Houston police chief Art Acevedo hasn't been afraid to go against the conservative orthodoxy so prevalent in his state before. In 2016, he decried the extremism within conservatism that leads to "Second Amendment Solutions," leading to a confrontation with Rush Limbaugh, who ridiculously claimed there were no such extremists in his party. (Someone get Rush a frickin' mirror, stat)

And this has been a very difficult week for Acevedo, dealing with the Santa Fe high school shooting.

The day of the shooting, he posted his on his Facebook page:

And he repeated it again on Face the Nation, after host Margaret Brennan asked him who he was specifically holding responsible.

"Well, let me tell you, people at the state level and the federal level and too many places in our country are not doing anything, other than offering prayers.

I'm grateful that I'm working in a city with a mayor who is transformative in Sylvester Turner. And what we're starting to see is that local governments are starting to make a difference." He said.

And he's right, it's at the local level that government is most immediately responsive to their constituents and making the greatest strides in sensible gun reform (as long as state governmental bodies don't intercede. And in the specific case of the Santa Fe shooter, even laws mandating safe storage and preventing access to minors (which can be enacted in municipalities) might have made the whole tragedy avoidable.

Acevedo continues, "And I think that the American people, gun owners, the vast majority of which are pragmatic and actually support gun sense and gun reform in terms of keeping guns in the right hands -- we need to start using the ballot box and ballot initiatives to take the matters out of the hands of people that are doing nothing that are elected into the hands of the people, to see that the will of the people in this country is actually carried out."

I can't think of a better argument to vote Democrat up and down the ticket than this.