This story first appeared at ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
What a scoop. 
For many Texans, southerners and Repubs, guns and god are literally the same thing (and to be used against gays, among others). It’s not a complicated matter, understanding these antipodes. Culturally and morally, they’re primitives.
State lawmakers have rejected dozens of bills that would have prevented people from legally obtaining weapons used in many mass shootings. Instead, they’ve made it easier for residents to get guns and harder for local governments to regulate them.
The subhead is much more accurate than the headline.
Well, come on, people! If you’re not constantly watering the Tree of Liberty with the blood of innocents, then … something, something, something.
Ok. Now to read (or skim; tldr) the article.
Every mass shooting of unarmed children makes the Repubs feel manly.
To fail, one must try. They REFUSE!
And they have the audacity to wrap themselves in their so-called “Christianity,” claiming to be pro-life.
The answer is very simple, the majority of Texans do not want gun control that they feel would violate their 2nd Amendment and Natural rights.
(snort) The voters? What do they have to do with gummint policy, anyway? … and there’s yet another reason to try and get gerrymandering under control.
Now can you get your politicians to do something? (Appreciate your comments, as always.)
Sure. Florida raised the age to purchase assault weapons to 21, but also enacted Stand your ground laws that the Koch brothers were pushing through ALEC.
Sure, we could get our politicians to make it legal for toddlers to open carry and whatnot.
The thing about the gun fetishists is that they will absolutely turn out and vote based solely on their penis extenders. There are approximately zero people of such conviction on the other side of the argument. So the majority position can be safely ignored because it is the softest position.
The problem is that “Gun Safety” or even “Gun Control” does nothing to prevent shootings, there are way too many guns already. What is needed is “Disarmament” but there is very little support for that.
Texas state politics are rather more complicated than that. And that’s not at all what their political ads say.
OTOH, the Republiqan Party has been disarmed of any intelligence.
We all predicted that mass shootings would become normalized and they did.
This is what you get.
With 6 young grandchildren, I find myself in school auditoriums sometimes 4 days a week. I know where all the exits are, what I would duck behind. Because of the occasionally odd make-up of the Mesa populace, I see parents who look like pictures off a pamphlet for the LDS church to people who look like they just left Duck Dynasty, I know there are a significant portion who are probably armed in some way.
I have actually been around for every mass shooting claiming more than 10 lives in modern American history except for the Camden shootings of 1949. Charles Whitman, the guy who shot random people from a tower at the U of Texas in 1966, has a Wikipedia page worthy of a two term American president.
Check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting#See_also
I believe that as long as we name them and show their pictures everywhere, not to mention comparing stats (Las Vegas still holds the record - congrats to Stephen Paddock!), we are doomed to read more and more of these stories and I am doomed to be a paranoid old man with a vivid imagination sitting fearfully in school auditoriums.