Fox News Sunday
Interview
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Well, Shannon, obviously, this is just devastating. Texans are hurting today. And the people who are hurting the most obviously are the families of the victims, families who lost loved one, families who have a loved one who is injured.
And our main priority right now is to help and support those families in the Allen community. And I'll be going up to Allen later today to begin the process of providing hope and healing.
But I got to tell you, there are questions that are lingering that the families want answers to, and that is, why did this happen? Why did that gunman do this? How did this happen? And I know that those families need answers as quickly as possible.
And then the last thing I'll tell you, and I just want to reiterate -- my gratitude and the gratitude of all Texans for the swift response of that police officer, with just a single police officer who had to confront that dangerous gunman, and did the right thing by taking swift action to eliminate the gunman, and we are grateful for that officer's heroism.
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Well, on the federal level, as you know, some laws were passed last year to begin to address this. At the state level, listen, this is something that we have been grappling with over the past year, and there are some potential easy solutions such as passing -- also we're working on right now to get guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals and to increase penalties for criminals to possess guns.
But, Shannon, we need to recognize the reality, that what we've seen across the United States over the past year or two, and that is an increased number of shootings in both red states and blue states. Shannon, we've seen an increased number of shootings in states with easy gun laws as well as states with very strict gun laws.
I think that the state in which the largest number of victims have occurred this year is in California where they have very tough gun laws were 11 people died. And so, one thing that we can observe very easily and that is there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of anger and violence that's taking place in America.
And what Texas is doing in a big-time way, we are working to address that anger and violence by going to its root cause which is addressing the mental health problems behind it. We know that Texas had been lagging in mental health for years, and that's why over the past three sessions, we've added almost $25 billion to address mental health. We're in the waning days of a session right now where we will be adding even more funding, about $3 billion to address mental health needs in the state of Texas, especially in rural Texas and especially for children in schools.
And people want a quick solution. The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.
And one last thing about this, Shannon, and that is it truly seems today that America is more divided than we've been in decades. And we've got to find a way in this country where we can once again reunite Americans as Americans and come together as one big family. In that regard, find ways to reduce violence in our country.
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Well, first of all, the reason why we are busing those migrants across the country is because small little towns on the border like Del Rio and Eagle Pass, they have no capacity to deal with the number of people coming across the border, and we have to relieve the congestion in those small communities and bus them to larger communities. By the way, communities that are sanctuary cities.
That said, Shannon, it must be pointed out also, everything that you just said that Mayorkas said is just a flat out lie or total ignorance. He says that the border is closed. Everybody in America knows that the border is not closed and it's more open.
Also, you said this is an issue that we've been grappling with first years and there's no clear answers from the federal government.
That is incorrect, Shannon, because the fact the matter is three years ago, we had the fewest border crossings in decades because the federal government under President Trump was able to put into place very easy policies such as the remain in Mexico policy, the Title 42 policy, end catch-and-release, and building a border wall, and sending a message that the country was closed. And that's why we have the fewest border crossings in decades.
Only when Biden came in and eliminated all those policies and put down a welcome back -- welcome mat to the entire world that the border is now open, that we suddenly have the chaos that has caused solely by policies put into place by Joe Biden.
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Because President Trump sent soldiers to the border to secure the border. President Biden is sending 1,500, quote, soldiers to do paperwork, and he's not going to secure the border.
We not need 1,500 soldiers. We need 15,000 or 150,000 to secure the border because of the open border policies of the Biden administration.
This is a day late and tens of thousands of soldiers too few.
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Thank you, Shannon.
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