There are real issues, and then there are the guns in District 53 race for Texas House

The race to succeed Andrew Murr as the 53rd District’s rep to the Texas Legislature focuses on two areas — guns and reality. 

In the first candidate forum, Wesley Virdell and Hatch Smith laid out their significant differences on various issues and why they should be the Republican nominee to succeed Murr. Held in Mason, Virdell and Smith spent about an hour discussing what they felt were their strengths to represent the vast district, which includes Kerr County, in Austin. 

For Virdell, who has the backing of hardline patriot groups, much of the focus was on protecting gun rights. Virdell is the Texas director of the Gun Owners of America. In 2022, he ran a blisteringly negative campaign against Murr and still lost in the Republican primary. The Brady resident positioned himself to challenge Murr, but Murr decided to retire. 

During the opening comments of the Jan. 22 forum, Virdell said, “I wanted to hold our current representative accountable.” That accountability was on gun rights — or unfettered gun rights. 

For the everyday Republican, the differences between Smith, who resides in Llano, and Virdell are not easily detectable, and their core issues are almost identical. Smith articulated five: Border security, water, healthcare, infrastructure and property taxes. Virdell got to three: the border, water, and guns. 

Virdell’s background includes an eight-year stint in the Air Force, followed by a return to Brady to take over the family heavy machine and truck repair business. Smith’s background took him to Cornell University and Wall Street before returning to ranch in Llano. More recently, Smith took on hospital administration to resurrect Llano’s small hospital. 

But their differences separated in a discussion about mental health care, not necessarily in tone but in solutions. 

Rather than hitting it head-on, Virdell wove his way to mental health care by discussing Gun Owners of America working to protect gun rights in the wake of the massacre at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in 2022. 

At the heart of Virdell’s point was it was the coronavirus-related shutdowns that caused the mental health problems and the media. His solution was to give sheriff’s offices more resources to handle the problem. 

“We have to bring back the resources they used to have,” Virdell said. “Until they get those resources back, they’re at a losing battle, and you have to get the people with mental health issues to help.” 

Vague? Of course. That’s politicking. 

The truth is that experts concede that depression, anxiety and substance abuse all elevated during the pandemic. But it wasn’t just the pandemic that was the root cause of this issue. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that the prospect of gun violence weighed heavily on the minds of children and teenagers. 

“For example, research has found that youth antidepressant use and suicide risk increased in communities with exposures to school shootings,” the Kaiser Family Foundation wrote in 2022. Additionally, a survey before the pandemic found that the majority of teenagers and their parents felt at least somewhat worried that a school shooting may occur at their school. In response to school shootings, nearly all schools practice active shooter drills.” 

While it’s clear that the pandemic sowed plenty of stress, other factors, including social media abuse and abuse of substances, contribute to the mental health crisis. Combating the problem is still evasive; while some experts urge expanding federal Medicaid funding for children with mental health problems, many states are opposed to Medicaid expansion, including Texas. 

Smith’s line on the question was more upfront, less meandering. 

“I would like to see an increase in funding for local municipalities and law enforcement to get more resources, partner with the schools and local health providers, and try to identify mental health issues at an earlier age,” Smith said. “The problem children are having with stigma is a parent doesn’t want to admit that they may have mental health issues. It really shouldn’t be a stigma. It’s no more a problem than somebody who has a broken leg.” 

The cordial meeting continued for another 30 minutes, covering other topics, including accepting the use of E-verify tools to stop the employment of illegal immigrants.