Unfair Park from p4 told the psychiatrist she’d like to see him. Calls were made, and soon enough, her boy- friend was driven from San Antonio’s Camp Bullis to Killeen. Hupp, her boyfriend, her siblings and their spouses gathered to grieve and deliberate. “We started getting a lot of calls from the press, and your first reaction is to go, ‘Oh, hell no!’” Hupp says. “But we spoke as a fam- ily, and we decided we’d speak to the press.” One of Hupp’s first calls was with a re- porter from The Associated Press. She told them she wasn’t mad at the shooter, because you can’t be mad at a “rabid dog.” But she was mad at her legislators, who she says pre- vented her defending herself and her family.. “You can’t help [it], but every time you close your eyes, you relive it,” she says, re- counting the seething anger she felt on the phone with AP. “And then you relive it with a gun in your hand. What if?” According to Dr. Robert Spitzer, a politi- cal science professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of five books on gun control, the Killeen shooting is a key moment in the his- tory of modern gun laws. Paired with a 1989 schoolyard shooting in Stockton, California, Hennard’s murders created a heightened fo- cus on gun rights. There was a trend in the 1990s, Spitzer says, when federal gun laws were becoming stricter while state laws were becoming more lax. Democrats and Republicans alike seized on the Killeen shooting to make their argu- ments. The shooting was name-checked in Bill Clinton’s gun control platform when he won the presidency a year later. At that point, an assault weapons ban proposed by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York had already failed miserably in the House, where Schumer was serving at the time. Clinton’s election gave gun control ad- vocates some hope, even if the narrative on the ground in Texas was already going in the other direction. “Maybe somebody could have stopped that crazy guy in there had there been an armed citizen,” Dr. Jim Brown, a spokesman for the Texas Rifle Association, said shortly after the shooting. “Maybe then he wouldn’t have gotten so far.” The local police chief made similar re- marks while suggesting that citizens ought to be able to carry guns for their own protec- tion. Hupp also entered the fray, sharing her story throughout the country and testifying in support of concealed carry laws. “I’ve been on every slime-bag talk show you can imagine, and some of them twice,” she told Texas Monthly. “I would always wash my hands well after I finished, but I think I’m glad I did them. I testified in a cou- ple dozen states and hopefully helped to change a vote or two.” She also ran for the Texas Legislature and won five terms, serving from 1997 through 2006. She continued to advocate for gun rights, often proposing laws centered on who was eligible to carry a weapon, where they could carry it and who had to know. Dr. Gregg Lee Carter, a sociologist who, 6 like Spitzer, has written extensively on gun control, cites Hupp as a key player in the “rallying cry” for gun rights created by the Luby’s shooting. “It is relatively uncommon for either side in the gun control debate to have an event that so clearly supports their argument and a spokesperson who can clearly and persua- sively articulate their position in personal terms,” Carter wrote. Before the Killeen shooting, the Texas Senate had passed a bill that allowed trained, licensed adults to obtain concealed- carry permits for handguns. As Carter re- counts in his book, Guns in American Society, there were enough votes to pass the bill on the floor of the Texas House. The House Rules Committee, “acting in secret,” Carter wrote, killed the bill by preventing it from reaching the House floor for a vote. “Even if the bill had passed the legisla- ture, however, Governor Ann Richards would have vetoed it, as she did when a handgun-carry bill passed the next legisla- ture,” the sociologist writes. “That veto played a major role in Richards’ 1994 elec- tion defeat by Republican George W. Bush.” A year later, Bush signed a concealed carry bill nearly identical to the one vetoed by Richards. Like Clinton’s push for an as- sault weapons ban, Bush’s position on con- cealed carry laws was a key part of his campaign. It was also wildly popular in Texas. As a Washington Post story said in 2000, “in the five years since Gov. George W. Bush took office, the concept of an armed citizenry as a deterrent to crime has gained a firm hold in Texas.” If you ask Spitzer, though, that concept has roots that go back much further than the Bush era. “America has long held a mythological view of our past, especially our frontier past,” he told the Observer. “The mythology of the West, the gunslinger and the cowboy began to emerge while it was happening, with peo- ple writing novels, newspaper writing and Samuel Colt, who was a genius of marketing.” Colt was the inventor and businessman best known for the mass production and sale of revolvers. The irony, Spitzer says, is that his biggest buyers weren’t ranchers. Rather, they were East Coast denizens enthralled by cowboy mythology. Spitzer adds that there is a direct link be- tween that mythology and the “armed citi- zenry” or “good guy with a gun” narrative Mike Brooks The window inside the former Luby’s cafeteria that many survivors found escape through during the rampage in 1991. that gained ground in Texas after the Killeen shooting. The professor says both this narra- tive and its mythological underpinnings don’t hold up under scrutiny. “At the turn of the 20th century, strict gun laws were the norm,” he explains. “The idea that average people carried guns and that’s how they pro- tected themselves is not true at all.” Likewise, he adds, “the idea that a good guy with a gun can save the day is part of the American ethos, but there’s a tiny sliver of evidence to show that’s the case.” Indeed, numerous studies indicate that concealed carry handgun laws actually pre- cede a rise in violent crime. A 2019 study published in the British Medical Journal re- vealed that states with “more relaxed” gun laws experience a higher rate of mass shoot- ings. (Four of the 10 deadliest mass shoot- ings since 1949 have happened in Texas.) These studies appear to have had little to no impact on public opinion. In recent years, Killeen survivors like Morris, the detective,have expressed sup- port for more gun accessibility, telling the Killeen Daily Herald in 2021, “There’s a lot of talk these days about gun control. But maybe if more people had a gun there at Luby’s, somebody could have stopped it.” Even though she is no longer in the Leg- islature, Hupp continues to appear on pod- casts and give interviews in support of more gun accessibility. In September 2019, a month after mass shootings in El Paso, Midland and Odessa, Hupp lobbied Con- gress for less gun control. These views, while controversial to many, are not as con- troversial as they may have once been. In March 1991, Gallup polling indicated that 68% of Americans wanted stricter gun laws. Today, that same polling question in- dicates that only a little over half want stricter laws. Further, in 1991, 43% of Americans believed only policemen should be able to carry guns. Today, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans hold that view. As state gun laws have become more re- laxed, many Americans have become gradu- ally more accepting of guns. “I’m happy and proud to be a little part of that,” Hupp told the Observer, referring to the passage of con- cealed carry laws. “It makes me feel like there’s some meaning to the deaths of my parents and others.” In some ways, though, she thinks there is still work to be done. “One of my real pet peeves, and I have filed bills to this effect, is I think teachers should be allowed to carry,” she says. “The schools are where these creeps go to rack up high body counts.” When she was interviewed for this story, Hupp said she was worried about her sister, a Texas teacher who was nearing retirement and, like all instructors, is legally barred from having a gun in the classroom. “She caught her principal and superin- tendent in the hall and said, ‘What are y’all doing to keep us safe?’” Hupp says. “They told her they put up new security cameras, so my sister laughed and said, ‘That’s great! That way they can watch the rampage from lots of different angles.’” Hupp laughed a bit, too, then got serious. “Of course, they didn’t find that funny,” she says. “She wasn’t in the restaurant with us, but she lost her parents. She gets it. They don’t get it. They don’t get it.” H istorian María Esther Hammack has said there is a “collective amnesia” after mass shootings. In her view, this “mass forgetting” represents “both in- tentional and subconscious healing for peo- ple — a way to desensitize or detach ourselves from the pain and the knowledge of such atrocities.” “What is interesting — and incredibly telling of how we remember mass shootings and the casualties in their aftermath — is that very few people today actually know about the Luby’s shooting,” she told Report- ing Texas. This may be true for many Americans, and even many Texans. Mass shootings have become seemingly endemic, and in 2014, shortly after then President Barack Obama remarked that such violence was “becoming the norm,” Harvard research showed that the rate of mass shootings had tripled since 2011. Ten years later, after the killings in Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe and El Paso, it’s common to read and hear stories about “compassion fatigue” or “psychic numbing.” The frequency of mass shootings is making some people too anxious or depressed to carry on with their lives in a “normal” fash- ion, while others are becoming desensitized. In Killeen, Towers refers to the Luby’s shooting as an “emotional remembrance” that still makes people cautious. Others are still coping with that day. The day before our conversation, Tow- ers was at lunch with one of the survivors, a woman we’ll call Joan. According to him, Joan still talks about her encounter with the shooter. Shortly after firing some rounds while still seated in his pickup, Hennard stepped out of the truck and began pacing the restau- rant. By all accounts, his victim selection was random; he’d let a woman escape with her child, then shoot the next person he saw hiding under a table. Eventually, he reached Joan. >> p8 JANUARY 13-19, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
