I’m not entirely sure what Abbott was talking about when he claimed that California has more gun deaths (recent mass shootings? total deaths?) but perhaps he doesn’t realize that California has a much bigger population than Texas. The statistical difference in gun deaths between California and Texas is quite large. California’s death rate per capita is 9 per 100,000. Texas’ is 15.6. California has the 8th lowest rate of gun deaths in the country. Texas has the 25th.
As for he general point that both blue states and red states have gun violence, it’s absolutely true. But it’s the red states that really get the bang for the buck:
A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts.
Researchers from Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California examined two decades of mortality rates and cause-of-death data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System to compile the study.
A Third Way report found that between 2000 and 2020, Trump-voting states had 12% higher murder rates than did Biden-voting cities.
Data shows that in 2020, eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election in this century.
In the past, Republicans have made crime a major campaign talking point—in October 2022, one quarter of attack ads on Democrats focused on crime, and in the two months leading up to the midterms, Fox aired about 141 crime segments on weekdays, according to the report.
A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine found guns became the leading cause of death for children starting in 2017—motor vehicle-related deaths held the number one spot for 60 years prior.
And yes Abbott does make the case for federal gun control since people can walk into any store in Texas, buy an AR-15, drive to California and mow down innocent people with it. It’s true that people get guns in all sorts of different ways but it would be really nice if the laws were uniform and they were strict enough to keep dangerous people from getting those of us who like to not live with bloody gun violence.
Speaking of which, Abbott’s very, very concerned about mental health. In 2022:
Abbott slashed nearly $211 million from the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which oversees mental health services in Texas.
Abbott diverted the funds to add to his effort to send National Guard to the Texas-Mexico border, currently known as Operation Lone Star.
No other Texas agency received a more significant cut than the HHSC when Abbott slashed funding.
The massive cut comes as Texas ranks 44th in the U.S. for an overall ranking of mental health measures and last out of all 50 states in access to mental health care, according to the 2022 State of Mental Health in America report.
He says they’ve raised the spending in the last three sessions but if they’ve raised it it’s only been this year. Here’s where Texas stands relative to the rest of the country:
And this study showed that Texas ranks last in the whole country in access to mental health care.
But sure, let’s have more mental health care. For the people who have to deal with things like this: