‘Gun-loving’ ex-US army officer calls for gun control after witnessing Texas mall shooting

Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by Picture-unrelated
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As an ex-police and US army officer, Steven Spainhouer is comfortable around firearms and goes so far as to describe himself as a “gun lover”.

But Spainhouer is now passionately arguing in favor of meaningful gun control after witnessing a rifle-wielding man murder several people before being shot to death by police outside a suburban Dallas shopping mall Saturday.

“We need some action in our legislatures at the federal and state level for better gun control,” he said in an interview with MSNBC a day after the mass killing outside Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas. “And I’m saying that as someone who loves guns.”

Spainhouer described rushing to the shopping center after his son called him saying he had heard gunfire. He arrived before emergency responders and performed CPR on some of those who had been felled by bullets.

In a separate interview with CBS, Spainhouer recounted the horrors he saw first-hand.

“The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes,” he told CBS. “So I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side and she had no face.”

Investigators determined 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia had shot eight people to death and wounded seven others outside the mall in Allen. A police officer who had gone to the mall on an unrelated call fatally shot the attacker, and a law enforcement official later told the Associated Press that Garcia had expressed an interest in white supremacist beliefs before carrying out the mass murder.

As of Monday morning, there had been more than 200 mass shootings and 20 mass killings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

That online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are either killed or wounded and a mass killing as one in which four or more victims are slain. The pace at which the US was on for the year as of Monday amounted to more than one mass killing weekly, much higher than it has been in recent years.

Spainhouer on MSNBC alluded to the condolences which Texas’s leading Republican politicians offered to the families of the slain. The messages echoed previous ones that came after a racist shooting at an El Paso Walmart left 23 dead in August 2019 and a separate gun attack at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year killed 19 students and two teachers.

Despite those mass killings in Texas as well as others across the US, Congress has been unable to substantially restrict access to high-powered guns. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state enacted a law which allowed Texas residents to legally carry guns without a license or training. A federal judge last year struck down one of the state’s few firearms restrictions, which barred people younger than 21 from carrying a gun.

And rather than impose limits on guns, which polling shows Americans generally favor, Texas’s state legislature is considering a bill that would require children in grade school to be given access to battlefield-style tourniquets and to be trained on how to use them to stop bleeding in case a mass shooter targets them.

The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News on Sunday and insisted that the dearth of adequate mental health services was the true culprit for deadly mass violence both in his state and elsewhere.

Abbott’s remarks ran contrary to evidence that fewer than 5% of violent cases have mental health links. And Spainhouer bristled at the notion that anything other than actual gun control policies would curb the pace of mass killings in the US.

“When you get hit with an automatic weapon fire at close range, there is no opportunity for survival,” Spainhouer said to MSNBC. “I don’t know what the gunman’s problem was, but it wasn’t mental health that killed these people. It was an automatic rifle with bullets.”

He added: “I’m a gun lover. I have guns. But these [high-powered rifles] have got to get off the streets, or this is going to keep happening. We’ve got to stop that at some point.”

rhetoricalnonsense on May 9th, 2023 at 14:04 UTC »

And rather than impose limits on guns, which polling shows Americans generally favor, Texas’s state legislature is considering a bill that would require children in grade school to be given access to battlefield-style tourniquets and to be trained on how to use them to stop bleeding in case a mass shooter targets them.

WHAT DID I JUST READ?!

BearDen17 on May 9th, 2023 at 11:28 UTC »

“It affected me so now it’s an issue.” - Republicans

my_brother_darryl on May 9th, 2023 at 09:30 UTC »

Another GOP scumbag "convert" but only because it happened to him.

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL.