Time is the enemy. A week has passed since 21 people were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde. Gov. Greg Abbott and other politicians bound to gun culture are squirming, but history tells us that public attention will subside, that voters will move on to other issues and that the Texas pols can relax into their ardent deregulation of guns, the No. 1 cause of death by injury for kids in the U.S. The elected officials who have done little to protect Texans and other Americans after mass shootings have something in common with the 19 first responders who idled in a hallway at Robb Elementary for more than an hour May 24 while a gunman killed 21 children and teachers. TOP VIDEOS × Those officials are frozen by their fear of what might happen if they act, governed by what the most zealous Second Amendment voters might do if they try to make gun safety a priority. They are not the noble heroes we hoped they would be. They’re just scared. They are doing their jobs as they see fit, tailoring their responses to the wishes of some of their most outspoken voters. Ignoring the massacre has risks of its own, but their political judgment is and has been that the wrath of gun rights supporters will be worse than the wrath of voters who think gun violence is out of hand. Get unlimited digital access Subscribe now for just $2 for 2 months. CLAIM OFFER What happened last week once again pits the deregulators against the consequences of their own work. Virtually anybody in Texas can buy or carry a gun, and that means virtually anybody will, trained or not, stable or not, evil or not. Voters can fix this, if they want. Politicians are hypersensitive to voters, and if the mandate is for anti-violence, that’s what the conversations in the capitals will be about. Our recent history predicts apathy — that in a short time, voters will move their attention elsewhere while the interest groups whose livelihoods depend on gun deregulation persist. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott displays his marksmenship at Red’s Indoor Range in Pfulgerville, Texas, Saturday, June 13, 2015. Abbott stopped at the gun range to sign into law bills letting Texans carry concealed handguns on college campuses and openly carry them virtually everywhere else. (Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman via AP) AUSTIN CHRONICLE OUT, COMMUNITY IMPACT OUT, INTERNET AND TV MUST CREDIT PHOTOGRAPHER AND STATESMAN.COM, MAGS OUT A gun lobbyist is nothing but a persistent activist, showing up to work every day with a particular focus, always talking to lawmakers, bending policy long after others’ attention has wandered. The rest of us? Not so much. That’s not just about gun safety. It happens with foster care, pandemic restrictions, just about everything. TX Politics newsletter Get government and election news that affects our region, plus a weekly take exclusive to the newsletter. SIGN UP This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The results haven’t changed because we haven’t changed. Our outrage faded after Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, Odessa and all the others. We get distracted. We put terrible things in our rearview mirrors and move on. It’s true that the politicians haven’t solved this, and that failing belongs to them. They’re cowards, shackled by the fear that voters will be harder on them for doing something than we are if, once again, they do nothing. That failing belongs to voters. The power to turn government heads is easy to understand and hard to exercise. All it takes is attention — and persistence, which is nothing more than sustained attention and action. Texas Republicans have controlled state government for more than two decades, consistently working to deregulate guns for years, believing that’s what their voters want, and Democrats are blaming them for the results and calling for new laws. That’s what their voters want. This is not an easy issue. There aren’t a couple of bumper-sticker solutions we can put into law to fix it. But the mindset, the will to solve the problem, doesn’t exist yet. It will take a long time and a ton of work, like coming up with vaccines in the face of an epidemic, or going to the moon or building a highway system. But lawmakers have promised action before and done little. They misled us, and voters should be as livid about that as the governor said he was about being misled by reports of law enforcement heroics in Uvalde. We’ve seen for years the power of the small group of voters who control Republican primaries in Texas, and by doing so, control state policy. If you make it easier for a murderer to obtain a murder weapon, you should have to explain to the victims and everyone else why you thought that was a good idea. Now’s the time. Lawmakers from both parties will respond to gun violence, but only if a persistent public demands it.

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