Tomás Q. Morín is a poet and visiting writer-in-residence at Texas Tech University. He’s also a seventh-generation Tejano.
“My family’s history in Texas goes back a long ways – before the border moved on us,” Morín says.
Mass shootings over the summer “depleted” him. He says it’s almost as if he doesn’t have any shock or outrage left in him because the shootings seem to be so frequent now. Even so, he says the El Paso shooting shook him, particularly because the shooter targeted “people who look like me,” he says. “It’s alarming.”
And he says these shootings are a continuation of the trauma many Americans have felt and passed down through generations.
“The way in which this country was taken and built upon the blood of Native Americans, the blood and the stolen lives of Africans, and I think the Second Amendment is intimately tied into all of this,” Morín says. “I can’t help but think that a country that is taken and built in such a way, that there wouldn’t be some sort of anxiety about being able to lose the country in the same way.”
Morín is a new father, which has forced him to think about how to protect his child – including thinking about using himself as a shield should he ever encounter an active shooter. He says it wouldn’t surprise him if active-shooter parenting classes soon become available.
“We’re at a point where we need it,” he says.
Written by Caroline Covington.
