To survivor, guns are the answer

Hector Tobar
Los Angeles Times
March 18, 2001

AUSTIN – State Rep. Suzanna Hupp doesn’t like to advertise the fact. But if you press her, she won’t deny it – yes, she does carry a loaded gun when she’s on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives. She feels safer.

For similar reasons, she authored a bill – three days before the recent school shooting in Santee, Calif. – to allow rural high school principals to carry concealed weapons on the job.

“People who commit these crimes are sick, twisted individuals who are looking for easy victims,” Hupp said Tuesday, which was Texas’ annual Second Amendment Day, marking the constitutional right to bear arms. Even in Texas, however, the proposal to arm principals faces an uphill struggle.

But spend 30 minutes in the company of Hupp and you’ll understand why a dozen more outrages like the ones at Columbine and Santana high schools would not be likely to produce much support for tougher gun laws in rural America, where owning a weapon is considered both a proud tradition and sacred right.

Hupp, 41, is a survivor of the 1991 massacre in Killeen, Texas, in which 23 people died. She has been elected three times to the Texas Legislature on what could be called a “guns and more guns” platform. She is the person perhaps most responsible for the 1996 law that allows Texans to carry concealed weapons.

The armed-principal bill is just one of a dozen gun bills she’s authored or co-authored for this year’s legislative session. Together, they would chip away at the remaining restrictions on carrying a weapon in Texas – it’s still illegal to carry a gun in churches, on university campuses and at public schools.

“I try to obey the law,” she said in an interview. “But when it isn’t convenient, or when I feel like I should (have a gun), then I carry. I never want to be in that position ever again.”

“That position” refers to the events of Oct. 16, 1991, the day that scarred Hupp forever and set her off on a public crusade.

She was having lunch with her parents at the Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen when a gunman crashed his car through the front window and began methodically shooting people. Hupp’s gun was locked in her car – it was then illegal for her to carry it. (At the time, she worked as a chiropractor and feared she would lose her license if she broke the law.) So she could do nothing while the gunman killed her mother and father. Hupp ran out a shattered window, thinking her mother was behind her, only to find out later that she had died embracing her husband.

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