God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (16 page)

I met Jones in 2009, when filmmaker Richard Linklater invited me to a screening of
American Prince,
a documentary by Tommy Pallotta. Rick has always been drawn to alternative ways of thinking, like an anthropologist studying vision quests among Plains Indians. He cast Jones as a street-corner prophet with a bullhorn in
A Scanner Darkly,
a rotoscoped realization of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel. Jones played a similar role in a previous Linklater film,
Waking Life.
I had only a dim idea who Jones was at the time. He had grown up in a suburb outside Dallas and moved to Austin. His defining moment was the siege by the U.S. government of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, in 1993. After that, he became an apostle of the extreme libertarian antigovernment movement.

Rick impishly introduced us, and then stood back with his arms crossed and a delighted expression on his face. Jones has a chunky build and a graveled voice and probing eyes. He knew about my book on al-Qaeda,
The Looming Tower,
although I didn’t have the impression that he had read it, or anything much on the subject. He ventured the opinion that American forces were sending “assassination squads” into Middle Eastern countries, “to take out the top guys” in al-Qaeda. I responded that a good source of mine, Jamal Khalifa, who was Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, had been murdered in Madagascar, I believe by American Special Forces. At that point, I suppose we were in agreement. I found him pleasant and curious—playful, in a way.

And yet, Jones’s bizarre assertions about 9/11 were already shouldering their way into the popular culture. He claims credit for founding the “9/11 Truth” movement, which in its most robust version goes like this: The U.S. government, in league with Israel, knew that al-Qaeda was going to strike America, but the terrorist group wasn’t capable of pulling off such an ambitious plan by itself. To ensure the success of the attack, American operatives placed high explosives in the towers, which detonated after the planes struck, creating a “controlled bombing” to bring the buildings down. Moreover, the Pentagon wasn’t actually struck by American Airlines Flight 77; it was hit by an American missile. As for the heroic actions of the passengers on the last of the hijacked planes, United Flight 93, who thwarted the attack on the White House, the Truthers assert that the plane was either shot down by a U.S. military jet or secretly landed safely. All this was done to provide an excuse to invade Iraq and steal the oil.

There is something mesmerizing about Jones’s ability to rant. He reminds me of the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whom I once interviewed. Like Swaggart, Jones lives in a world of revelation, convincing himself of the truth of whatever comes out of his mouth. He may also be a “performance artist,” as Jones’s lawyer recently claimed in a custody battle with his former wife, but that suggests he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying—that he’s only talking for effect. Rick later told me that about a week after 9/11, when he and Jones were walking to a screening of
Waking Life,
Jones admitted that the U.S. government wasn’t actually responsible for 9/11, “but they’re going to use this for all kinds of horrible stuff.” “He was right about that,” Rick observed, “but that kind of insight isn’t easily monetized.”

Jones claims a long history in Texas, saying that his “great-great-great-great-great-grandfather” was at Gonzales, the site of the famous cannon that inspired the “Come and Take It” flag. Jones made a speech in front of the Alamo in 2013, with the Gonzales flag flying behind him and a semiautomatic weapon slung over his shoulder. According to Jones, the central message his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather wanted to deliver to the Mexican forces was “We’re not turning our guns in and we’re not running and we’re not backing down. If you want ’em, come and take ’em!”

After the speech, he and the camera crew wandered over to sport with a small counterdemonstration in favor of gun control. There’s a video of an older woman asking Jones to leave. She says that she wasn’t trying to take his guns away from him. “Santa Anna wanted the guns!” Jones says as the woman starts to walk off. But then the woman’s husband, an older, bald man in a sweater vest, steps in front of Jones. “A gun grab is something nobody in this country wants,” he says.

“Well, sir, all I can say is, you’re really getting in my space,” Jones responds. They are actually standing very close together.

“Why don’t you back up,” the man says.

“No, I’m not gonna back up.” Jones moves in closer, chest to chest. “Listen, I don’t want to beat an old guy up, so don’t touch me.”

“This guy could take you out in a heartbeat, dear,” the wife warns Jones.

Jones wisely steps back.

While the husband continues to engage with Jones, his exasperated wife tells him, “Sweetheart, you’re giving them what they want.” There’s obviously something deeper going on between the couple. The husband clings to her wrist, but he can’t tear himself away from Jones.

“Do you know that assault rifles are only used in two percent of crimes?” Jones asks.

“I know that an assault rifle was used to murder my daughter in Aurora,” the husband says.

Jones jumps back. “I didn’t touch your daughter!” he cries.

Jones had called the 2012
Batman
shooting, in which twelve people were killed and seventy injured in a movie theater in the Denver suburb of Aurora, “a false flag, mind-control event.” He contends that the movie itself was “a weaponized, propaganda warfare system” with subliminal messages designed to make people frightened of terrorism, so that “Bloomberg, Chuckie Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the usual suspects” could push for gun control. Similar Jones rants about mass tragedies being staged by the government have generated death threats for parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Another Jones acolyte walked into Comet Ping Pong, a family-oriented pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., in December 2016, and fired a semiautomatic weapon, saying he was there to investigate the claims, made by Jones, that the restaurant was the center of a child pornography ring, led by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Jones eventually apologized for that incident, apparently under legal pressure, but he rarely accepts responsibility for the damage done to the reputations and lives of people he has slandered.

In the summer of 2015, when the U.S. Army announced its intention to conduct a massive, eight-week training exercise called Jade Helm, ranging across seven states, Jones floated the “news” that the federal government was planning to occupy Texas and impose martial law. Walmarts were being converted into concentration camps. Blue Bell Ice Cream trucks would become mobile morgues. “This is an invasion,” he claimed, “in preparation for the financial collapse and maybe even Obama not leaving office.” Instead of switching stations, Governor Greg Abbott hurriedly called out the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the exercise. (Yes, we have our own state militia, just in case.)

Jones’s fantasies caught the ear of Donald Trump when he started suggesting that Hillary Clinton belonged in prison. That became a mantra in the Trump presidential campaign, as did Jones’s allegation that President Obama and Hillary Clinton founded ISIS and that she was being kept alive only by drugs. “It is surreal to talk about issues here on air and then word for word hear Trump say it two days later,” Jones marveled. On another occasion he remarked, “We’re like synced—there isn’t any wires in our ears—literally, to each other.” Trump himself told Jones on his show, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. And I think we will be speaking a lot.”

Talented and relentless, Patrick brought with him the expected AM platform of anti-abortion absolutism and hostility to same-sex marriage and illegal immigration. “When he was first elected, he was treated as a pariah in the Senate,” Miller said. “Everyone thought he was going to be a crazy man.” But he won respect through his service on the education committee, eventually serving as its chairman. “He was recognized for his artfulness,” says Miller. In 2014, Patrick beat the incumbent lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, in the primary, and then rolled into office atop another Republican tidal wave. Evan Smith, the cofounder of
The Texas Tribune
, an online journal of state politics, said of Patrick, “He’s the most conservative person ever elected to statewide office in the history of Texas.”

FM and AM Texas rarely talk to each other, but in September 2015, after the shooting of a police officer in Houston by a former mental patient, Patrick appeared on an NPR station in Austin. Patrick had urged Texans to be always respectful of peace officers and to thoughtfully pick up their tabs when they see them in restaurants. David Brown, the urbane host of
Texas Standard,
gently pointed out that there had been a substantial backlash online to Patrick’s statement. Videos of police abuse and the shooting of unarmed citizens were generating national concern about police behavior. “Even people who don’t engage in reckless rhetoric have said things like ‘Look, respect has to be earned,’ ” Brown said. “There’s a lot of skepticism out there. How do you convince those people?”

“You know, your type of interview has to stop,” Patrick abruptly replied. “When I was asked to do an interview on NPR, I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to do this? They’re not in the police officers’ corner.’ And you’ve proven that by your interview.”

(Patrick declined several opportunities to speak with me.)

Patrick’s signature accomplishment has been the passage of laws allowing certified license holders to openly carry weapons and also to carry concealed weapons on public college campuses. He told Chuck Todd on
Meet the Press
that the fear that guns in public places would create undue alarm was “just propaganda by those who either don’t like guns or who are afraid of guns.”

The lieutenant governor’s statement made me recall an incident on May 11, 2013, when Steve Harrigan and I were in Dallas for a literary event, along with our wives and Steve’s daughter Charlotte. We decided to visit the George W. Bush Library on the campus of Southern Methodist University. It was less than a month after the Boston Marathon bombing and the day before a mass shooting at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans. We were lined up with a large crowd in the vast marble atrium, called Freedom Hall, waiting to enter the exhibitions, when someone cried out, “Active shooter!”

Everyone in the room did exactly the wrong thing: we all hit the deck. An old man near me fell; I saw his head bounce on the marble floor. We were trapped inside a stone box, totally exposed. The library was locked down. Out of nowhere two campus cops appeared with automatic weapons. A private security guard crept behind the ticket booth with his unholstered pistol. People were openly weeping. Roberta was hunched between two evangelical women who whispered urgent prayers into her ears. “I knew this would happen,” Steve’s daughter said, giving voice to the lack of surprise we felt to be caught in yet another tragedy of the sort that we’ve all read about and watched on TV.

As it turned out, the event in Dallas was “nothing.” A black child had been playing outside with a toy gun, which his parents had purchased earlier at the Texas Ranger museum. Like all toy weapons these days, it had an orange tip to clearly distinguish it from the real thing. The boy needed to go inside to the bathroom, so he gave his toy to his father, who was on a park bench smoking. Suddenly there was a black man with a gun. The cops put him on the ground and handcuffed him, then questioned him for two hours before letting him go. The panic that we experienced that day was unwarranted, but it underscored the fact that the open display of weapons is unnerving, even in Texas, and perhaps especially on college campuses.

The age of mass shootings in public spaces actually began on a campus in Texas—on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman, a twenty-five-year-old engineering student, Eagle Scout, and former marine, murdered his mother and his wife, then barricaded himself in the top of the landmark tower in the heart of the University of Texas in Austin. He had a duffel bag full of weapons and a clear view of the entire low-slung town. He could see the narrow lake that divides Austin into north and south. To the west was the Balcones Fault, where the Hill Country begins, and to the east the flat coastal plain. When Whitman pulled the trigger and changed America, the giant clock above him showed that it was 11:48 a.m.

For the next ninety-six minutes, Whitman fired on the campus and the adjacent shops along Guadalupe Street. The first person he shot was Claire Wilson James, a classmate of mine from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas. Claire was in summer school. She was eight months pregnant, and Whitman apparently aimed at her unborn child, who was the first to die. Claire lay on the blistering pavement, her abdomen ripped open, pretending to be dead. Her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman, fell dead beside her, shot through the neck. Whitman would shoot forty-three people from the tower that day, killing fourteen (a fifteenth victim eventually succumbed in 2001 from complications from the injury to his kidney).

The plaza in front of the tower where Claire lay with her dead boyfriend was about half the size of a football field, totally exposed. You can’t imagine how hot the pavement is in August. As she lay there, believing that this was how her life would end, a redheaded coed named Rita Jones (later, Rita Starpattern, a visual artist) suddenly ran out to her and asked how she might help. Claire told her to run or she’d get shot. Instead, Rita lay beside her on the blistering concrete, peppering Claire with personal questions about what classes she was taking and where she grew up, keeping her from sinking into unconsciousness. Finally, about an hour into the siege, two daring seventeen-year-old boys raced out and dragged Claire to safety behind a statue of Jefferson Davis.

Within minutes of Whitman’s sniper attack, students and citizens began firing back. There were deer rifles in the dormitories, and pistols in purses and glove compartments. Armed vigilantes crouched behind statues of Confederate heroes or took aim behind the narrow shelter of a telephone pole. “There was a mood of insanity, of wildness, of craziness in the air,” one of the students later recalled.

There were no SWAT teams back then, although the improvisatory police response to the tower shooting would immediately make the case for them. Nor did the university even have a police force of its own. An Austin cop named Houston McCoy, one of the first responders, had a shotgun, which was useless at a distance, so he drove a student to his apartment to pick up his rifle, and then stopped at a hardware store to buy ammunition. There was practically no direction from police headquarters; this kind of thing was completely new. An innovative police sharpshooter tried to shoot Whitman from a private plane. Meantime, three police officers, and a civilian deputized on the spot, climbed to the top of the tower, stepping over the bodies of people Whitman had slain on his way up.

AM Texas and FM Texas drew opposing lessons from the UT shooting. Claire James would later testify before the Texas legislature that the return fire impeded her rescue and prevented police from taking effective action. The courageous Austin police officers who ascended to the top of the tower did have to dodge the incoming fusillade, which showered them with dust and bits of limestone as they crept along the observation deck. On the other hand, gun proponents argued that by keeping Whitman pinned down, the vigilantes reduced the number of casualties by forcing him to shoot through rainwater spouts. “Before anybody fired at him, he had the run of the place. He could shoot over the walls and he could find targets,” Ray Martinez, one of the cops who finally shot Whitman to death, recalled. “But of course I was concerned I was going to get killed by friendly fire when we were up there.”

The law didn’t change after that. It remained illegal for Texans to carry guns outside their home or vehicle. Then, in 1991, George Hennard, who was thirty-five and unemployed, drove his blue Ford pickup through the plate-glass window of the Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen. There were about 150 people having lunch. At first, they thought it was a freakish accident. A veterinarian in the room rushed to assist Hennard, who shot him, and then cried, “It’s payback time, Bell County! I hope y’all enjoy this!”

Suzanna Hupp, a chiropractor, was having lunch with her parents. “My father and I got down on the floor and we put the table in front of us,” she later testified before the U.S. Congress. “It took me a good forty-five seconds to realize this man wasn’t there to commit a robbery, he wasn’t there for a ‘hit.’ He was there to shoot as many people as he possibly could.” She reached for her purse, where she kept her pistol, then realized that she had left her gun in her car, fearing that she might lose her chiropractor’s license if she were caught carrying a concealed weapon.

Her father bravely rushed the shooter, but he was quickly shot down. Hupp told her mother that they needed to make a break for it, and then she raced to the back of the building and jumped out a window. When she looked back, she realized her mother had gone to comfort her dying husband. Hennard put a bullet in her head. “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers!” he cried. He shot fifty people, killing twenty-three of them, most of them women, before killing himself.

“I’m not really mad at the guy who did this,” Hupp told lawmakers in Washington. “That’s like being mad at a rabid dog.” She continued: “I’m mad at my legislators for legislating me out of the right to protect me and my family.” In 1996, Hupp got elected to the Texas House of Representatives, and subsequently passed a law allowing concealed weapons. It was signed by then governor George W. Bush.

That wasn’t sufficient for the gun lobby, however. They wanted Texans to have the right to openly carry their handguns—as was already legal in forty-four other states. When framed that way, it did seem odd that Texas gun laws were more restrictive than those in most other places, but did we really want gunslingers in our restaurants and theaters? Gun advocates in Texas set people on edge by parading down Congress Avenue in front of the state capitol, carrying their long guns, as was legal, or walking into Target stores, which they selected for symbolic purposes. Polls showed that two-thirds of Texans opposed the measure, as did a large majority of the police chiefs in the state, but their complaints didn’t register. Open carry became legal on January 1, 2016. It’s rare to see anyone in public strapping a sidearm, but everywhere you look on public buildings you see signs in English and Spanish barring weapons, both openly carried and concealed. Punitive lawmakers required the font of the lengthy texts be an inch high. Scientific measurements were taken, showing that, when stacked on top of each other, the two signs were the height of a pony.

The statistics on crime and guns are often confounding. Nationally, guns account for 60 percent of all homicides; and yet gun violence has been declining for the last decade. The murder rate in Texas has dropped from 16.9 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4.8 in 2015—an astonishing decline. In California, the most restrictive state in the country for gun ownership, the murder rate is exactly the same as in Texas. The states with the lowest homicide rates are North Dakota and Wyoming, which have very permissive gun laws; and lowest of all, at 1.6 per 100,000, is Vermont, which has “constitutional carry”—i.e., anyone over the age of sixteen can carry a gun. (Vermont is one of thirteen states where permits to carry concealed weapons are not required.) Chicago, which has highly restrictive gun laws, also has one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the country, but it doesn’t compare with the District of Columbia, which tops the charts in both restrictive gun laws and gun homicides. When President Obama said, “States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths,” he was including suicides, which account for nearly two-thirds of gun deaths nationally.

Still, the rate of murder by gun in the United States is far above that of any other developed Western country, and has been increasing since 2015. The rate of gun murders in the United States is six times higher than in Canada, and more than twenty times higher than in Australia.

Although I appreciate the efforts of the anti-gun lobby, I doubt there is room for anything other than modest reforms. The NRA has permanently changed America. There are now more than 300 million guns in the country—42 percent of the total of civilian firearms in the whole world. Other countries with a high rate of gun ownership (though nowhere near as high as the United States), such as Switzerland, Sweden, and France, have lower rates of gun deaths, largely because of more stringent licensing rules and an emphasis on gun safety. Universal background checks that keep guns away from violent offenders, people on the terrorist watch list, and the mentally ill are the most important steps we could take to limit the damage that guns do to our society.

In November 2017, twenty-six people were shot to death at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Another twenty were injured. Eight of those killed were children. It was (at this writing) the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history. These days, it seems that the killers are always aiming for the record books. In this case, the killer had once escaped from a psychiatric hospital. He had been court-martialed for domestic abuse by the air force, which then failed to put his name in the FBI’s database, which might have prevented him from buying weapons over the counter. He was flagged again and again for abusive behavior and death threats. It’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of the failure of our national gun laws to prevent a dangerous man from breaking the hearts of so many innocent people.