Gov. Greg Abbott at DISD headquarters announcing school safety plan

Gov. Greg Abbott released his 40-page school safety program to address the growing epidemic of school shootings by saying, “I can assure you, I will never allow Second Amendment rights to be infringed.”

Rather than speaking at Santa Fe High School surrounded by students who were affected by gun violence, Abbott spoke at Dallas ISD’s headquarters surrounded by Republican politicians.

Main points of Abbott’s plan:

• Increase the number of possible school marshals
• Expand mental health services.
• Monitor social media for possibly dangerous students
• Increase age in the state’s safe storage law for parents with 16 year olds to 18 years old.
• Reducing entrances and exits despite students at Santa Fe reporting they were getting trampled trying to get out of the school.
• Increase crime-stopper programs
• Arm more teachers
• Release an app to get students to report other students’ behavior
• Remove firearms from persons determined dangerous to themselves or others for specified limited amounts of times

Abbott did say this plan is a starting point, not an end point.

Abbott’s full plan can be found here.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Lupe Valdez released the following response:

“I commend the participants of the roundtables for working to try to improve our school safety, but it is clear that under this leadership we won’t see nearly enough of the changes we need. Despite the effort, this move by the governor falls woefully short and includes ideas that will only make matters worse. While some of these actions, like increased mental health counseling, are essential and should have been enacted years ago, it is astounding how few of Gov. Abbott’s proposals directly address gun violence and how he ignored some of the most critical steps we must take. With this insufficient plan, Gov. Abbott has proven yet again why parents, teachers and students can’t trust him.

“Our children deserve more than Gov.r Abbott’s willful neglect and Lt. Gov. Patrick blaming women’s health, video games, and too many doors for these preventable tragedies. Gov. Abbott’s proposals accept gun violence in our schools and communities as inevitable and unavoidable; we must demand more. It’s time to act, and in the coming days I will lay out common sense steps to address the crisis head-on.”