A Texas governor picks guns over humanity | Will Bunch Newsletter

I never expected that it would be the vaunted Boston Celtics who’d be calling “Mayday!” after their May 1 encounter with our Philadelphia 76ers, not with likely NBA MVP Joel Embiid watching from the bench with his wounded knee. But the Sixers’ alternate superstar James Harden buried the hearts of Bostonians. Every time I try to get out of Philly sports during these last crazy months, they pull me back in.

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📮 Last week’s question about favorites in the Philly’s mayor race drew a smaller response from my core of local readers. But several of you are supporting the business-oriented ex-council member Allan Domb, including reader Mel (no last name) who declared: “We need someone who knows reality.” But Karen Shields backs ex-controller Rebecca Rhynhart “as two former mayors [note: Michael Nutter and John Street, with Ed Rendell also coming on board after her email] are currently suggesting she is the one.”

This week’s question: Should President Biden negotiate the debt ceiling with House Republicans, or is that giving in to political blackmail? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

Sonia Argentina Guzman was a 25-year-old mom and wife with one foot still planted in her native Honduras — for years she sent money to build her own mother a new home — but the other gaining a powerful hold in her adopted nation, the United States.

Relatives told the Houston Chronicle that Guzman loved the East Texas home where she, her soccer-loving 9-year-old son Daniel, and her husband Wilson Garcia had settled because the thick green canopy of the forested rural area, an hour north of Houston, reminded her of her home in Central America.

Guzman may have lacked U.S. citizenship papers, but she was here long enough for her American dreams to be extinguished in her new homeland’s peculiar and deadly national ritual.

On Friday night, Guzman, her son, and three other members of her extended family were killed with an AR-15 rifle in a shooting spree by their next-door neighbor, who was said to be furious when several men at the Hondurans’ home asked him to stop firing the weapon in his front yard because he was waking a baby.

The nation’s latest of its too-many mass shootings — in San Jacinto County, Texas, with its grisly details of adults dying while protecting kids beneath them, as other terrified family members hid in closets — received extensive news coverage. It became — for now, anyway — the worst of a series of recent incidents in which gunmen shot people over seemingly slight provocations like a basketball rolling onto a yard or young revelers pulling into the wrong driveway. It was a story that made you wonder how low a country suffocating from gun worship and paranoia can go.

Then Texas Gov. Greg Abbott entered the chat.

First, as immigrant communities in and around a small Texas town mourned and outsiders wondered what the heck is happening in the Wild Wild West that Abbott governs, the two-term Republican tweeted a photo the day after the shooting of one of his golden retrievers with the caption: “All smiles for the weekend.” Perhaps informed by aides this wasn’t a good look and maybe he should at least offer perfunctory “thoughts and prayers” for the dead, Abbott went a different direction.

On Sunday, with the murderous neighbor and his AR-15 still on the lam, Abbott tweeted that the Lone Star State is offering a $50,000 reward “for info on the criminal who killed five illegal immigrants Friday.” For the first time ever, “thoughts and prayers” would have better.

There’s a lot going on here, but’s let’s start with the most obvious and the most repulsive. To dismiss law-abiding citizens — including a young child who wanted to be a police officer when he grew up — who were murdered while striving for a better life in Abbott’s Texas as “illegal immigrants” is denying their basic humanity. Abbott’s contempt for these victims of a heinous crime is spitting on their graves before they are even dug. And it’s also a partial lie: A local community activist said that one of the dead — 21-year-old Diana Velasquez Alvarado — was a permanent U.S. resident and published a picture of her government ID card.

But also ... everything is bigger in Texas, right? Except for this chintzy reward of $50,000, or $10,000 apiece, for lives with so much potential that were cut short. Abbott is not being subtle at all here. He is proclaiming that Texas does not value these particular lives. Meanwhile, the governor had also last weekend dispatched 50 Humvees to the Rio Grande River on a mission to “prevent, deter, interdict” border crossers. (Abbott did also tell his border cops “to be on the lookout” for the murderous neighbor, a Mexican national who’s been deported as many as four times.)

Abbott’s Texas has spent a gob-smacking $4 billion-plus on border security — not even a state job, but a federal one — and is planning to increase that in 2023, despite having next to nothing to show for all that wasted cash. The GOP-led government’s obsession with keeping out migrants could be seen as the latest iteration of white supremacy in a state that fought for the Confederacy and saw the Texas Rangers brutalize and murder brown people at and near the border for decades. One could argue that Abbott’s macho posturing against immigrants is also a good way to change the subject from his deadly failures to fix the state’s troubled power grid or the frequent floods, more powerful hurricanes, or droughts that spotlight his climate denial.

But let’s be honest: Abbott is happy to take the heat for slandering the dead because he’d rather you talk about that than the biggest fail of administration: its permissive gun culture — highlighted by the governor’s signature on a “constitutional carry” bill that allows Texans to carry concealed weapons without a permit or training and has turned the Lone Star State into a shooting gallery where danger seems to lurk everywhere.

The anecdotes are piling up. In Houston, a man on a dinner date found out he’d been scammed of $40 by a man posing as a parking-lot attendant, so he ran outside, shot and killed the scammer in an argument, then came inside to resume his date. Meanwhile, a Texas A&M University-Texarkana baseball player was hit once in the chest by a bullet — apparently fired from the nearby neighborhood — as he sat in the bullpen during a game.

And that was just last week — the same week as a mass shooting.

Of course, Texas is also an epicenter of mass shootings: El Paso. Sutherland Springs. Uvalde. And as road-rage shootings have doubled across America, one study found that Texas has the most such killings — by far. It it the guns? Yes, it’s the guns. In fact, gun deaths overall — shootings and also suicides — have increased in the state by about 70% over the course of the 21st century. This in our most lax gun-safety state, which includes not just the “constitutional carry” abomination but also a judge lowering the gun-purchase age to 18, in a state where unlicensed gun dealers continue to sell deadly weapons without a background check.

Greg Abbott wants you to think about the immigration status of five innocent, slaughtered Honduran-Americans because he doesn’t want you thinking about how easy it was for a man without citizenship papers to obtain an AR-15, a weapon of war, in his state. Nor does the governor want his voters to ponder why a state that spends billions on its own mini-army can’t keep Texans safe from bullets in a parking lot, in a baseball bullpen, or in their front yard. On Monday night, Abbott issued a new statement that included his “regret” for botching the immigration status of Diana Velasquez Alvarado. But the 29.5 million residents of the most dangerous and fear-wracked state in America will have to wait for any apology from the politicians who made it this way.

Question: What do you think of ranked choice voting? The chances of RCV being adopted in Pennsylvania? — Brendan Cunningham via email (!).

Answer: Thanks for a great question, Brendan, and thanks for sending it by email to wbunch@inquirer.com — anyone can do this at any time (and make my life easier)! I have mixed emotions about ranked-choice voting, in which voters designate a first-, second-, and third-choice (or more) in a multi-candidate field. Currently in Philadelphia’s decisive Democratic mayoral primary, without ranked-choice voting, you have five candidates equally splitting the vote. This means a) as few as 60,000 may pick the winner, in a city of 1.6 million and b) that winner could be someone with a rabid fan base who’s also loathed by a majority of the electorate. The goal of ranked-choice voting is a consensus winner who’s most widely accepted by the public. It’s hard to judge yet how well this works: ranked-choice voting thwarted the divisive Sarah Palin in Alaska, yet it somehow produced the awful, library-killing police state of Eric Adams in New York City. It probably doesn’t matter because it’s hard to imagine the self-interested, anti-reform nabobs of Pennsylvania politics ever approving this.

He comes most Fridays in the dead of the weekend night, when our supposed 24/7 news cycle is struggling to stay awake and it’s left to a handful of insomniacs to go on Twitter and ask each other: Did HBO comedian and self-anointed social commentator Bill Maher actually say that? The 67-year-old Maher has long branded himself as “Politically Incorrect” (the title of his one-time show on ABC, which cancelled him for being politically incorrect), while he’s ping-ponged from giving $1 million to Barack Obama to today’s rants about the danger of “wokeness” in the classroom, a venue where Maher has not stepped since graduating from Cornell in 1978.

This all reached its apotheosis last Friday on Real Time With Bill Maher when he held his version of a white-privilege summit, or whine festival, with the world’s sometimes richest man, Twitter destroyer, and 2nd-worst-ever Wharton graduate: Elon Musk. As you might guess, their one-on-one sitdown rapidly devolved into a fact-free diatribe against what they called “the woke mind virus” allegedly infecting American society, but especially our colleges and universities. It was kind of rich (pun intended) coming from one man (Maher) who has never raised children and another (Musk) who needs tracking devices to know where his kids are and remember how many he has.

But what really struck me hardest was how Maher, born near the absolute peak of the post-war baby boom, in 1956, sounded so much like the angry ”generation gap” parents of the 1960s and ‘70s that “never trust anyone over 30″ boomers once quarreled with and made fun of. “The kids think that they’re equal!” Maher blurted out at one point, which seems to be the real threat for aging white dudes like him and Musk. Those of us who’ve actually raised children in the 21st century know that while over-enthusiastic and still-learning young people can go too far at times (as they also did in the ‘60s), they don’t so much think that they’re equal. Rather, they’re just thinking about how they make the world better than the messed-up planet that boomer Maher and Gen X-er Musk gifted to them, with its active-shooter drills, climate-choking private jets, and broken system of learning that’s behind a mental-health crisis of epic proportions. Bill Maher is the living embodiment of Harry Chapin’s 1974 “Cat’s in the Cradle,” growing up to be just like an early-’70s dad — except with a national TV platform for his get-off-my-lawn rants.

On this date seven years ago, I was pondering both the latest sexist outburst from then-presidential contender Donald Trump — he’d questioned whether Hillary Clinton would be getting as much as 5% of the primary vote “if she were a man” — and a talk I’d just seen at Penn’s Kelly Writers House by Matthew Weiner, the creative genius behind my all-time favorite TV show, Mad Men. On May 2, 2016, I wrote how little had changed since the mid-1960s misogyny that Mad Men had mined for seven seasons: “That you can be a U.S. senator and a secretary of state and that you can still be dismissed for your gender, your authority undermined, written off as a humorless you-now-what.” Seven years later, has much changed since I wrote the piece headlined, “Hillary, Peggy Olson, and the ‘Mad Men’-ization of politics”?