| UNFAIR PARK | Fear Factor After Uvalde, teachers are scared, gun reformists want change, and so far politicians haven’t done anything different. BY KATE PEZZULLI E choes of the gunfire that ended the lives of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde last month still reverberate in schoolrooms far from the grief-stricken South Texas town. In North Texas teachers are struggling with fear driven by the state’s lat- est mass killing at a school. In the days after 18-year-old Salvador Ra- mos opened fire at Robb Elementary, schools in DFW and other parts of Texas re- ported a rash of threats and guns on cam- puses, sparking fears of copycat killers. Teachers, already battered by months dealing with the pandemic and chronically short resources, say they are on edge emo- tionally, and the debate among political leaders over how to prevent what appears to be inevitable — another school, more dead kids — is doing little to soothe them. “Those emotions range from fear, anger, frustration, sickening grief and extreme sadness,” Rena Honea, president of the Al- liance-AFT educators union in Dallas, said via email. Lauren Walsh, a special education teacher and educational diagnostician in Denton ISD, has dealt with all of those fol- lowing the deaths in Uvalde. “When we heard about it at school … I just cried with a bunch of my coworkers. We just cried,” Walsh said. “We showed up the next day and cried more. [We] pretended to keep it together for the kids, but it is legiti- mately terrifying.” Walsh said the shooting left her wonder- ing how safe she was in the halls of her own school. “I literally was walking through the cafe- teria that next day, and had to go a back way to get into my classroom,” Walsh said. “And my very first thought that I had when I turned the corner in that dark, sketchy little hallway … was like, what if there’s a shooter right there? I would just be a goner I guess.” Ramos legally bought the rifle he carried to the school from a licensed dealer in Texas a few days before the shooting. Texas law doesn’t require a person to obtain a permit or have any training to carry a handgun, and anyone 18 or older may purchase a rifle. If the past is any indicator, that’s not likely to change anytime soon. After a gunman killed 10 people at Santa 44 Fe High School near Houston in 2018, Gov. Greg Abbott introduced Senate Bill 11, Kate Pezzulli which was designed to protect school chil- dren from further mass shootings by strengthening mental health initiatives and “hardening” campuses by allowing more school marshals to carry guns. Abbott said then that the measure would “do more than Texas has ever done to make schools safer places for our stu- dents, for our educators, for our parents and families.” Then came Uvalde, not to mention the more than 20 other mass shootings in Texas since then. The Gun Violence Archive describes a mass shooting as having “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not in- cluding any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.” (Ramos was killed by law enforcement officers at the school.) So far this year, Texas has had 22 mass shootings, including one in Waco that left four people wounded just five days after Uvalde. Texas and California are tied for the most mass shootings in the country in 2022, with Illinois and Louisiana tied at 16, fol- lowed by Florida at 12. Taking population into account, California, which has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws, had 8.5 deaths per 100,000 population in 2020, ac- cording to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Texas’ rate was 14.2, placing it roughly in the middle of the pack among all states. According to the Gun Violence Archive, 150 children ages 11 or younger have been killed by gun violence in the U.S. this year. Another 529 ages 12-17 have died. The U.S. overall has had 230 mass shootings in 2022 as of June 1. The nation has seen 27 shoot- ings at schools, though not all were “mass” shootings. Uvalde is the deadliest. Honea said she sees threats becoming more common. Gun rights proponents are quick to point out that the threat of a child being killed in a school shooting is small. But the fear and hopelessness generated by Uvalde and Santa Fe and Sandy Hook and other school shootings exists and are just one more straw on the backs of teachers al- ready stressed by a shortage of teachers. “If you’re not in a school right now, work- ing with kids, you don’t understand how hard it is,” Walsh said. “It’s honestly unfath- omable what’s happening in schools right now. And I think people just don’t know. They just have no idea.” The Observer reached out to Andi Turner, legislative director at the Texas State Rifle Association, for the group’s reac- tion to Uvalde. “I can’t help you. I do not comment. On a professional level, I do not comment,” Special education teacher Lauren Walsh worries how safe her own school is. Turner said. “We do not comment on active investigations.” Turner has spoken with the Observer in the past about gun controversies. For in- stance, last September for a story about the danger of Texas’ new permitless carry law, she said: “We’re not seeing the blood in the streets and the danger that some people are concerned with.” The National Rifle Association hosted a convention in Houston days after the Uvalde deaths. Attendees revealed to The Texas Tribune what they believe to be the cause of the shootings. They said they were horrified, but access to guns was not to blame. The general con- sensus was that the problems were “a broader breakdown in society, wrought by the removal of God from public schools, the decline of two-parent households, a per- ceived leniency toward criminals, social me- dia and an increase in mental illness.” In a mix of victim-blaming and circular reasoning, Lyndon Boff, 67, told The Tribune that it’s not guns that killed the people, “it’s their programs teaching children in school that our country is a bunch of crap.” Still, those who want new regulations soldier on. 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