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The Allen Premium Outlets are about half an hour from my house. For more than 20 years, it's been a great location to find some reduced prices on many high-end brands, as manufacturers offer closeout, discontinued, or factory-second items direct to consumers.
Allen is what you might call a high-end suburb. About 25 miles north of downtown Dallas, its booming population has nearly doubled since the Outlets opened in 2000, just passing 100,000. The sprawling shopping facility is quite the destination for locals and others driving farther to snag some savings and a dip into other northern DFW-area offerings.
It was an ordinary Saturday that was shattered by the bullets of the latest monster to shoot his way into our headlines. The days since have brought particular sharpness to the reactions in Texas communities where a default setting of gun rights appreciation is now under withering scrutiny. Many wonder if this tragedy will change how our state and our culture views guns, and what solutions might be sought to reduce such horrific events.
Before policy differences erupted, area hearts endured the slow reveal of the victims' names, a list as diverse as the growing community. Aishwarya Thatikonda was an engineer, an Indian immigrant living her American dream. Ilda Mendoza brought her elementary-school daughters shopping, and saw them killed before her eyes. She is hospitalized along with five other survivors.
One survivor has been most notably on the minds and hearts of our community: 6-year-old William Cho, whose parents and 3-year-old little brother were among those killed. A GoFundMe for his benefit set out with a goal of $50,000. By midweek it had garnered nearly $2 million.
No amount of money will bring William's family back. No legislative or societal shift can undo the evil that has been done. All we can do is absorb the shock and try to figure out how to reduce such horrors in the future.
That discussion is predictably poisoned by those whose political agendas are soaked in venom for those who differ. A debate over gun control measures is proper; hateful smears are not, and that's what Second Amendment advocates have faced, even in deep-red Texas. Democratic Congressman Colin Allred, seeking Ted Cruz's U.S. Senate seat next year, has shed his affable center-left branding to blame Cruz (and thus every gun rights advocate) for the carnage, as if his party's "common-sense" reforms would have thwarted this or any other shooting.
Texans of every faith lifted up prayers for those lost and hurting and for their families and communities. But woe be unto those whose faith-filled good wishes were not accompanied by the gun-grabbing stance of San Antonio State Senator Roland Gutierrez: "You can take your thoughts and prayers, and you know where to tell them to put them," he blurted Monday, the same day he tweeted that those who dared to differ have "blood on their hands."
The "common-sense" ideas surfacing again include so-called red flag laws, which are constitutionally troubling due to their abrogation of due process, and a call to increase certain age limits for weapon purchases to 21, a clear violation of Second Amendment rights for adults aged 18 to 20.
If we decide we made a colossal mistake in pushing the line for adulthood back to 18, let's correct it. But until we do, there is no argument for denying liberty to people who can vote and die for their country. But such arguments are lost in the emotional rush to "do something," which bypasses the repairs needed in our fractured society.
A trickle of Republican Texas legislators has begun to cave under the emotional pressure, one explaining to constituents that his change of heart comes after lengthy testimony from parents who lost children in the Uvalde school shooting a year ago. Our hearts should go out to every loved one in such circumstances, but their pain does not make them policy experts and their testimony should not erode constitutional sensibilities.
Texas and other states face debates over how to address the alarming frequency of broken people choosing to visit violent evil upon the innocent. Maybe there is common ground to be explored, such as enacting an easy, authoritative standard for background checks in every state that could identify gun purchasers who should be blocked for sufficiently qualifying criminal or mental health histories.
That would require identifying where the bar should be set for stopping a purchase. That may vary from state to state. But as the states head down any path of policy discussions, we can make things better ourselves in two small ways. First, some grace amid disagreement would be nice. Not everyone seeking a tightening of gun laws intends eventual confiscation, and the citizens standing firm against increased controls are not ghouls indifferent to the human toll of gun violence.
And second, when people invoke the faith that can be a key ingredient to repairing the twisted culture that is the real reason for increased mass shootings, let's see less mockery from those whose solutions lie only among lawmakers.
Mark Davis is a talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
