In Greg Abbott’s Republican Texas, public schools sent kids home with a DNA kit so their parents could identify them after a mass shooting or other emergency.
“The state of Texas is sending public school students home with DNA kits designed to help their parents identify their children ‘in case of an emergency.’” Today reported.
“After the mass shooting in Uvalde, the kits are making many parents feel even more anxious about sending their children to school,” they open.
The kits are for K-8 level, and for the purpose of: “if law enforcement were to need help finding a missing or trafficked child, or identifying victims of mass shootings,” Reform Austin reported.
Furthermore:
“When you put it in the light of Uvalde, it’s one of the most macabre things you could think about,” said Bob Sanborn, president of the nonprofit Children at Risk.
Parents of the children killed at Robb Elementary had to provide DNA samples to help identify their slain children, due to the amount of bodily harm done by the AR-style rifle used in the massacre.
A Uvalde student was just arrested Monday evening after making a shooting threat, a mere four plus months after the May 24th massacre that killed 19 students and 2 teachers.
Responses have not been positive.
We should just start issuing all our students dog tags so we can identify their bodies if they’re killed in battle, I mean, recess.
— Julia A. Pulver, MSN, RN, CCM (@VotePulver) October 18, 2022
It’s like sending kids into D-Day.
— PMG (@pmginmyhead) October 18, 2022
Instead of trying to keep guns out of the hands of minors and backing common sense background checks, Republicans actually responded to the mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa that took the lives of 30 people by loosening gun restrictions. :
Confronted with mass shootings, Texas Republicans have repeatedly loosened gun laws
Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders signaled an openness to some gun restrictions after recent mass shootings. But in the last several years, lawmakers have eased gun laws, most notably by passing a permitless carry bill last year.
… That’s how we got to this place where parents are being sent DNA kits so they can identify their kids.
Republicans are running on being the party of parents. So naturally, one of their platforms is making sure kids are not safe at school because they fetishize guns to the degree that any political terrorist group might. Because guns = power to Republicans.
Not in a democracy, of course, but that’s something they hope to change. If you get rid of the democracy and the law doesn’t work anymore, the guns win. So children being slaughtered is just more acceptable to them collateral damage in the relentless Republican power grab.
Republicans are on board with gun manufacturers having more rights than kids do and of course more rights than women or girls.
The dehumanization of children should be a wake-up call for our country.
This is yet another test of how much the people will allow Republicans to get away with, as they continue their autocratization of our formerly free country.
It’s way past time to ask ourselves: Who does this? And if they do this to children, what else might they do? What else would be acceptable to this party, since murdering children is something they have sought to make EASIER and their base are fine with?
And lastly, where is the “pro-life” agenda we keep hearing so much about?
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
