Over the Labor Day weekend, in Midland, Texas, on the last day of August, a thirty-six year old man who had recently been fired was stopped by police for making a wrong signal.
The shooter then shot law enforcement officers with an assault weapon.
He fled toward Odessa, twenty miles away, spraying bullets randomly at residents and motorists.
Then he hijacked a postal truck and ditched his Honda, shooting at people as he sped toward Odessa, where police confronted him in the parking lot of a movie theatre and killed him in a shootout.
Just before he was killed by law enforcement, the shooter killed seven people between 15 and 57 years old. He also wounded a 17-month old girl and three law enforcement officers (https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/01/us/odessa-texas-shooting-sunday/index.html).
All this happened in the Lone Star State, where a gunman killed twenty-two people exactly one month ago at a Walmart in El Paso. The shooter in that massacre had driven all the way from Dallas to El Paso, intent on killing people with brown skins. That shooter, who is in custody, killed twenty-two people.
The governor of Texas is Greg Abbott, a Republican like Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
In yesterday’s Times, Texan Richard Parker asked why Abbott said, essentially, nothing meaningful about Saturday’s massacre in Midland and Odessa (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/opinion/odessa-texas-shooting.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share).
Parker wrote: “We Texans love to swagger, brag and boast that we are the biggest, most, and first. In the uniquely American horror story of mass shootings, we [Texans] are closing in on all three. With Saturday’s mass murder in ….Odessa, Texas has now had more casualties from major mass shootings than any state except Nevada.”
Parker continued: “After El Paso, it was discovered that the governor had made a fund-raising appeal the day before that shooting [italics in original], referencing immigrants: 'If we’re going to DEFEND Texas, we’ll need to take matters into our own hands.’ Mr. Abbott’s language, like President Trump’s, eerily reflected the [El Paso] killer’s racist online screed.”
Parker concluded: “He [Abbott] has never had the guts to do more than mouth a few platitudes while paying obeisance to the gun lobby and the state’s admittedly historic gun culture. In 2015, he even tweeted: 'I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind. CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texas. @NRA.’ “
So we here at AP asked associate solitary reporter Phyllis Meadows, a lifetime resident of West Texas, what she expects of the Texas legislature, which won’t meet again until January 2021.
“No matter which Democrat defeats Trump,” Meadows said, “Texas will always be Republican. So don’t expect anything to change in Texas on guns.”
The all-powerful governor of Texas makes $150,000 a year.
After associate solitary reporter Susanna Sherman heard her friend Meadows give that terse explanation, Sherman rushed in with the breaking news that the NRA’s top gunslinger, Wayne LaPierre, has resigned amid the recent intense controversy over the NRA’s infighting and dwindling finances.
Sherman, very excited, continued by telling ASR Meadows that Abbott has just resigned as governor of Texas to replace LaPierre.
Wayne LaPierre has been paid at least one million dollars a year during his time at the NRA, and his net worth is ten million dollars (http://money.com/money/5178193/wayne-lapierre-net-worth-nra-money-salary/), so when Abbott starts working at the NRA as LaPIerre’s replacement, he’ll be much more powerful than LaPierre; he’ll be making a lot more money than he did as governor of Texas; and he’ll have easy access to Donald Trump, who desperately needs to pull in all 38 of Texas’ Electoral College votes next year, if he wants to keep strutting into his Oval Office in January 2021, and beyond.
Back to Texan Richard Parker’s op-ed in the Times of September 1: “Even as the Trump administration has turned Texas into a battleground of controversy, [when it comes to curbing gun violence] Mr. Abbott has made less noise than a frog in a drought” (emphasis added).
As of press time here at AP, LaPierre has been hired as the head honcho of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, based in Denver. LaPierre will replace RMGO’s Dudley Brown. RMGO is even more extreme in promoting the Second Amendment than the NRA, and as we have said in this apocryphal newspaper many times, Donald Trump wants to replace the First Amendment with the Second Amendment.
We fully expect that Dudley Brown will run for the Colorado State Senate now that he’s lost his job at RMGO.
Finally, associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, who covers Congress for us, has just told us that Sen. Rand Paul (Tea Party-Kentucky) has filed a bill which would abolish the National Hurricane Center. Mr. Paul had just been watching CNN, which now says that Dorian is stalled over the Bahamas (https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/hurricane-dorian-september-2019/index.html).
“That piddly little Dorian, he’s just sittin' quietly over the Bahamas, and he will never dare even to approach the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, or Virginia, because Mr. Trump’s gonna shoot it down with lots of nukes."
“I am an ophthalmologist,” Sen. Paul continued, “and my vision is very clear, much clearer than those dolts at the National Hurricane Center whose salaries are plunging our nation into irretrievable debt.”