UVALDE, Texas – “We as a state, we as a society, must do a greater job with psychological well being. Anybody who shoots one other particular person has a psychological well being downside. Interval. We as a authorities must discover a technique to tackle that psychological well being problem and do one thing about it.”
These are the phrases of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, simply days after an 18-year-old highschool scholar massacred 19 college students and two lecturers at Robb Elementary Faculty in Uvalde.
Abbott has doubled down on his stance that mass shootings are a psychological well being problem and never a problem of entry to weapons after the Uvalde bloodbath.
Nevertheless, in April, Abbott lower almost $211 million from the Well being and Human Providers Fee (HHSC), which oversees psychological well being companies in Texas.
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Abbott diverted the funds so as to add to his effort to ship the Nationwide Guard to the Texas-Mexico border, now referred to as Operation Lone Star.
No different Texas company obtained a extra important lower than HHSC when Abbott lower funding.
The large lower comes as Texas ranks fourth within the US for the prevalence of psychological sickness and ranks backside of the 50 states for entry to psychological well being care, in accordance with the 2022 State of Psychological Well being report. in America.
The Texas Legislature has spent billions over the previous decade funding DPS’s so-called border safety mission, although few metrics exist to measure its success.
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A few of these operations have occurred in and round Uvalde, which is just below 100 miles from the border.
The truth is, Abbott’s workplace allotted $three.three million to Uvalde County in February for county legislation enforcement businesses to assist “prosecute border-related crimes, together with drug and human smuggling, and associated legal trespassing and evading arrest,” reported Uvalde Chief Information.
On Friday, Abbott mentioned the choice of passing new legal guidelines to make sure that faculties are safer. He once more attributed the issue to psychological well being and particularly to not entry to weapons or violence.
“You’ll be able to look ahead to a sturdy dialogue, and I look ahead to laws being handed, which I’ll signal, that tackle well being care on this state. There are a selection of well being care points that we face as a state usually, however there are a number of well being care points that relate to those that commit firearms crimes specifically. These have to be addressed,” Abbott stated. “…If there may be anybody right here who thinks that now we have good well being care on this nation or on this world, they’re improper. If anybody thinks we won’t do extra to handle psychological well being care, they’re improper. We will and we’ll.”
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