After Another Shooting, Texans Should Take Conversations About Public Safety Offline

By Daniel Van Oudenaren

Texans are again mourning the death of innocents gunned down by an active shooter, this time at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, where two worshippers on Sunday lost their lives in a seemingly random attack.

This follows the church shooting in Sutherland Springs, the Santa Fe High School shooting, the El Paso Walmart shooting, and the Midland-Odessa shooting.

In the wake of each shooting, Texans have taken to social media to find information, offer sympathy to victims and survivors, and debate ways that the epidemic of violence might be stemmed.

Because social media is by now an indelible part of public life, it’s natural for concerned Texans to do this, and it’s reasonable to expect this pattern to continue.

But we’re badly in need of a reality check as to the limits of political discourse online. These social media platforms are woefully inadequate to host respectful, deep conversations in search of real solutions to improve public safety. The lack of face-to-face contact erodes trust from the get-go, as does the anonymity of large numbers of users, and the ubiquity of trolls.

Needless to say, social media is also distracting. Let’s not delude ourselves that we’re going to tackle a grim, intractable problem between Baby Yoda GIFs and outrage over a Peloton commercial.

For this one we’re actually going to need to sit down face-to-face.

By now, however, so much public discourse has moved online that it’s hard to know where to start. Where do these conversations go if not to Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit? Well, first among friends and neighbors, provided that they’re open to it. From there there’s the city hall, the commissioners court, school boards, citizen advisory councils, businesses, churches, and the legislature.

Now more than ever, Texas churches, schools, and businesses need real solutions to meet their safety needs, and they’re not getting any help from utopian idealists on the extremes who advocate on the one side for a general disarmament, or on the other side for arming practically everyone. In the middle are practical ideas that are being ignored.

Consensus is possible on certain public safety measures, on limited legal changes addressing gun safety and access, on measures that address social contagion, root causes, and mental health, etc.

In the case of the latest shooting, preliminary reports indicate that the shooter had a long rap sheet making it illegal for him to possess a firearm under existing law. This raises questions already around enforcement, loopholes, recidivism, and other topics worthy of discussion.

Public safety solutions are unlikely to look the same in every Texas community. The West Freeway Church where Sunday’s attack occurred had a security arrangement that almost certainly saved lives. We may all cheer the fact that there’s an unambiguous hero, Jack Wilson, the church’s deacon in charge of security, who gunned down the shooter within seconds.

But this doesn’t mean that West Freeway’s approach to security is appropriate everywhere, or that it would work just as well in every scenario. Texans need to come together offline to find solutions that work for their communities, as well as some policy decisions that affect the state as a whole, and perhaps the nation too.

One good starting point for informed discussion is a new report by the Secret Service, “Protecting America’s Schools,” based on an detailed study of 41 incidents of targeted school violence over a 10-year period. The report doesn’t offer specific policy prescriptions but it could serve as a resource for school boards, law enforcement, and state policymakers.

Texans might also be interested in following the proceedings of special committees of the Texas Legislature formed after the El Paso Walmart shooting. These committees, one in the House and one in the Senate, are tasked with studying mass violence prevention and community safety, including identifying threats early.

Thus far there’s been limited political buy-in and public engagement with these committees for a couple of reasons, including political upheaval in the Texas House, the highly charged election atmosphere, and the relatively narrow scope of the committees’ mandates.

But it’s nevertheless possible for Texans to engage with these committees by contacting their legislator, attending committee hearings (the next one is in El Paso on January 9th), or by watching the hearings online. Texans also can and should make public safety a campaign issue in the upcoming primaries and general election.

Let’s get out from behind our keyboards and actually talk to each other the old-fashioned way, look one another in the eye, hear one another out, and ask ourselves: How can we make our communities safer? How can we make our state safer? What should be done?

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