Good Lord. This is some upsetting stuff, so stop reading now if this is not something you want to face today.
On May 18, 2018, a student entered Santa Fe High School, between Houston and Galveston, and opened fire with two guns, killing eight students and two teachers.
Exactly four years later, an 18-year-old entered his former school, Robb Elementary, in Uvalde, fatally shooting 19 students and two teachers, while only yards away dozens of police milled about in a hallway for more than an hour awaiting instructions to confront him.
Just one week after that, a convicted murderer in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice took advantage of a cascade of security lapses, slipping out of his handcuffs and leg shackles, knifing a guard and hijacking a prison bus. After three weeks on the run, he entered a cabin in Centerville and murdered a man and four of his grandchildren, aged 11 to 18.
Apart from being appalling acts of mass murder, what unites the three events is that this year the Texas Legislature quietly voted to pay for separate memorials honoring the victims of each. Buried in the state’s massive 2026-2027 spending plan is $1.6 million in Gov. Greg Abbott’s budget for a memorial honoring the Collins family members killed by the escaped convict; $2.7 million in the Texas Education Agency to create the Santa Fe memorial; and $10 million for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to install a tribute to the Uvalde victims.
Experts say that for families and loved ones of the victims, survivors and members of the local communities where the crimes occurred, planning and constructing a physical monument acknowledging such tragedies can be an important part of the healing process.
“Most communities do end up having some permanent memorial,” said Alyssa Rheingold, who as director of Response, Recovery, & Resilience at the University of South Carolina’s National Mass Violence Center, has consulted on memorials at more than 20 sites of mass violence.
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“There are too many victims now, and there are bound to be more in the future,” said state Rep. Joe Moody. In 2023, the El Paso Democrat introduced a bill to build a single monument to Texas mass shooting victims on the Capitol complex in Austin, where he hoped it would both honor victims and confront state lawmakers.
The measure failed to gain support, he said, because most would rather not address the obvious role of firearms: “My point was to continue to shine a light on mass shootings and gun violence.”
So individual Texas communities keep adding their own. When completed, the memorials in Uvalde, Santa Fe and Centerville will bring to at least 13 the number of permanent structures that together display the engraved names of more than 150 Texans killed. It is a tour no one wants to take.
I’m going to stop here because I’m already seething. The story lists what I think are all of the currently existing memorials, beginning with the one at the UT bell tower from the Whitman massacre in the 60s. Read on if you want but take some deep breaths first. It is wholly appropriate and worthwhile to memorialize these people that we have lost. They deserve it, their families and friends and neighbors and classmates and coworkers and everyone else affected by their loss deserve it. They also deserve a real effort to make these horrific events less frequent. That is very much not in the works.