In the almost two centuries since the Battle of the Alamo, Texans’ love for guns has been well documented in dime-store novels and Hollywood westerns. However, in the Texas Capitol, the issue has become a political purity test that often prioritizes the whims of primary voters and special-interest groups over sound judgment and public safety.
Ahead of the Jan. 14 start of the 2025 Texas Legislative Session, lawmakers have filed more than 80 bills and joint resolutions dealing with firearms. From a violence-prevention standpoint, some are as bad as the Texas Legislature’s reputation would lead you to expect (read: bad), a few are well intended but misguided, and others are surprisingly reasonable.
According to an analysis from the non-profit organization led by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — gun deaths in Texas rose 63% between 2014 (the year before Gov. Greg Abbott took office) and 2022. During that same time, the state’s homicide rate rose by 69%, according to FBI crime data.
Of course, across the U.S., the debate over guns — who can have them? what kind? with what restrictions? and how easily can they be obtained? — has been brewing since the 1960s, when the country endured a sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin and a spate of political assassinations, and has only intensified since millions of Americans watched live coverage of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School. That tragedy heralded a new era of mass shootings, an era in which each shooter seemingly attempts to top the previous killer’s death toll, like runners trying to beat the four-minute mile.
Texas has faced a renewed spotlight since a 2022 mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school left 19 children and two teachers dead. That shooting — the ninth deadliest in U.S. history — was only the fourth deadliest to occur in the state, which has played host to six of America’s 25 deadliest. Including the one in Uvalde, four of those six shootings occurred within the past decade.
In 2017, a 26-year-old man opened fire at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, killing 26 people and wounding 20 others. The following year, a 17-year-old in Santa Fe, near Houston, killed 10 people and injured 13 at his high school. The year after that, a 21-year-old gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people and injuring another 26.
During the 2021 legislative session — the first after El Paso — Abbott signed what supporters called “constitutional carry” into law, allowing residents to carry handguns without either training or a license. That expansion of gun rights came just eight years after the Legislature halved the number of training hours required for licensure and six years after it removed the requirement that handguns be kept concealed in public.
Lawmakers in the Lone Star State have, in the past two decades, approved more than 100 bills loosening regulations on firearms, according to the Texas Tribune. The 2025 session is unlikely to be any different.
Gun legislation generally falls under one of three categories: bills that regulate where a person may possess a gun, bills that regulate what type of gun a person may possess, and bills that regulate who may possess a gun. Below is a breakdown of key legislation to watch in each category.
Where Are Guns Allowed?
Citizens Carrying Concealed Handguns in K-12 Schools
Senate Bill 83
Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) has, for the fourth consecutive session, filed legislation to allow any license to carry holder (the state still offers licenses even though they are no longer required in most places) to carry a concealed handgun into public K-12 schools. This proposal might seem like a natural extension of the 2015 law that legalized licensed, concealed carry on college campuses (one of the few places where a license is still required); however, there are critical differences between college campuses, which are populated primarily by adults, and K-12 schools, which are populated primarily by children and the handful of adults who serve as their temporary guardians.
In the event of a shooting on a college campus, most adults (students, faculty or staff) with a license to carry have no responsibility for any life but their own and are free to focus on extricating themselves from the situation as they were trained to do in the Texas LTC course.
A teacher at a K-12 school, on the other hand, doesn’t have the option of abandoning a classroom full of six-year-olds and simply running for safety. Instead, her position as temporary guardian for those students forces her into the role of de facto security guard, a role for which the five-hour Texas LTC course has in no way prepared her.
Primary and secondary schools, unlike college campuses, are secured environments with controlled points of entry. Given that K-12 schools go to great lengths to keep guns off campus and that licensed, concealed carry has proven to have little benefit to anyone other than the carrier, there is little justification for allowing each and every license holder to carry a gun into these locations. And there is no reason to expect teachers and administrators to perform a security role for which they have no training.
If a school board feels the need to arm teachers or administrators as security guards, Texas has a School Marshal program that puts school employees through police firearms training, then licenses them as limited-authority law enforcement officers.
Guns at the State Fair — and All Events on Property Owned by the State
House Bill 1715
In the aftermath of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s fight against the gun ban implemented by the State Fair of Texas, Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-Deer Park) has filed a bill to prohibit any private entity that rents property from the state from restricting licensed carry on the property.
Current state law says that the licensed carry of handguns cannot be criminalized on property, other than a statutory gun-free zone, that is “owned or leased by a governmental entity.” However, there is an ongoing debate as to whether the word “leased” — which, grammatically, can apply to either the lessor (the property owner/landlord) or the lessee (the tenant) — was intended to apply only to private property rented by a state entity or to include state property rented by a private entity.
If “leased” applies to both landlords and tenants, there is still the question of whether a private entity, such as the State Fair of Texas, can use enforcement measures such as metal detectors to prohibit licensed carry without criminalizing it. And if so, does the Texas Local Government Code preclude the private entity’s use of local police to enforce the prohibition?
Cain’s bill would settle that debate by requiring all new or renewed leases of state property to include a provision prohibiting the tenant from restricting licensed carry on the property.
Although the current law is a muddled mess, HB 1715 paints with far too broad a brush. The law against turning public property into gun-free zones was passed to prevent cities from prohibiting lawful carry in libraries and civic centers where no steps have been taken to prohibit unlawful carry. But what about a location like the state fair, which is secured with metal detectors and armed guards?
The State Fair of Texas has implemented security measures to ensure that its event is truly gun-free, and the Legislature should honor those efforts by clarifying state law to unambiguously allow private entities to utilize such measures on state property.
Remove the State Government’s Right to Regulate Guns — At All
House Joint Resolution 93
Representative-elect Andy Hopper (R-Decatur) has filed a constitutional amendment that would guarantee each and every Texan the right to keep and bear arms. The amendment would accomplish this feat by stripping the Legislature of the authority to regulate arms.
In the 18 years I’ve been involved in Texas gun politics, I’ve seen legislators take some pretty big swings, but a yet-to-be-sworn-in freshman’s prefiling a constitutional amendment that would deny lawmakers the authority to regulate guns is a uniquely bold move. Check back in five months to find out how it worked out for him.
Types of Firearms
Raise the Age Limit for Semiautomatic Rifles
House Bills 313, 384, 579, 1150 & 1556
This one has a visceral appeal to anyone concerned about school shootings — but it’s flawed.
Several Democratic lawmakers, including Ann Johnson (Houston), Vikki Goodwin (Austin), Ron Reynolds (Missouri City), Penny Morales Shaw (Houston) and Joe Moody (El Paso), have each refiled retiring Rep. Tracy King’s (D-Uvalde) well-intended but misguided 2023 bill to raise the age limit to purchase a semiautomatic rifle.
(“Semiautomatic” means that the gun automatically ejects the spent casing and loads a fresh cartridge after each shot, allowing the shooter to fire the gun as quickly as he can pull the trigger. The gun fires one shot each time the trigger is pulled, until the magazine is empty.)
One year after the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, King’s bill garnered a good deal of attention, both because the families of the victims lobbied tirelessly for its passage and because two Republican representatives shocked their colleagues by voting at the 11th hour to pass the bill out of committee (the bill subsequently died after the House Calendars Committee failed to schedule it for a vote by the full House).
Although there is merit in trying to make it harder for a troubled 18-year-old to obtain a gun that can be used to create mass carnage, a “raise-the-age” bill that focuses exclusively on semiautomatic rifles is unlikely to save many, if any, lives because an 18-year-old would still be allowed to purchase numerous other guns that can be just as deadly.
Under this bill, an 18-year-old could legally walk into a gun store and purchase a semiautomatic AR-15-style or AK-47-style shotgun, both of which, at the close range of a typical school shooting, are capable of inflicting greater damage than are their rifle counterparts.
Furthermore, a gun store would still be allowed to sell an 18-year-old a pump-action or lever-action AR-15 variant, which — despite not being semiautomatic — can easily exceed the average rate of fire from a typical school shooting.
And although a gun store can’t legally sell a pistol to an 18-year-old, a private seller at a gun show or on an online message board could still legally sell an 18-year-old a semiautomatic Glock 19 pistol like the one used in 2007 to kill 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech (the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history); a semiautomatic Glock 17 pistol like the one used in 1991 to kill 23 diners at a Killeen, Texas, Luby’s cafeteria (the seventh-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history); or a semiautomatic AR-15 pistol, which is virtually identical to the AR-15 rifles used by the Sandy Hook, Uvalde and Parkland shooters but without the buttstock (the buyer could then legally purchase a buttstock or a virtually identical pistol brace for about $50).
As it’s currently written, this bill wouldn’t accomplish much; however, the only change necessary to fix it is a shift from focusing on semiautomatic rifles to focusing on firearms that accept detachable magazines. A bill to raise the age to purchase any firearm that accepts detachable magazines would cover all of the guns mentioned above but leave most hunting rifles and shotguns unaffected.
Who Can Own Guns?
Even People Who’ve Threatened Violence Get to Keep Their Guns
House Bill 162
Briscoe Cain has, for the third consecutive session, filed a bill to prohibit cities and counties from adopting extreme risk protection laws and to ensure that Texas law enforcement agencies cannot enforce any such laws enacted at the federal level.
It seems that after every high-profile school shooting, from the 17 faculty and students killed in 2018 in Parkland, Florida, to the 22 killed in Uvalde, we learn about myriad warning signs, or “red flags,” that went unheeded because nobody had the tools or authority to act on them. This has led gun safety activists to focus their recent efforts on passing extreme risk protection laws, or “red flag” laws, that would authorize a court to order the temporary removal of guns from someone who has threatened violence.
Gun rights activists are concerned that any type of preemptive action against someone who hasn’t yet committed a crime might deny due process to the accused; however, Cain would better serve his constituents by figuring out how to pass a “red flag” law that ensures due process than by attempting to nullify such laws altogether.
(It’s worth noting that HB 162’s prohibition against municipal and county ordinances is likely redundant, given that Texas law already prohibits cities and counties from regulating firearms.)
People Who Threaten Violence Have Their Guns Temporarily Removed (ie, “Red Flag” Laws)
House Bills 234, 478, 655 & 893
Four House Democrats (Johnson, Goodwin, Reynolds and Moody) have filed well-written “red flag” legislation that would allow a court to temporarily remove guns from someone who has demonstrated a propensity for violence.
All four bills are basically the same, so I’ll focus on HB 893 by El Paso Rep. Joe Moody. Essentially, this bill would allow a family member or prosecuting attorney to file an application for an extreme risk protective order on the basis of firsthand information “regarding any dangerous behavior or conduct exhibited by the respondent as a result of a serious mental illness, including any behavior or conduct related to the respondent’s use of firearms.”
The applicant would be required to attest, under oath, that the individual in question “poses an immediate and present danger of causing bodily injury, serious bodily injury, or death to any person.”
Within two weeks of the issuance of an extreme risk protective order, the subject of the order would be afforded a hearing at which he would be able to challenge the order and provide evidence refuting the allegations against him.
If the presiding judge found the application to have merit, the respondent’s guns would be temporarily removed from his possession for up to one year; however, the respondent could request to have the ruling reconsidered after three months. Any person found to have made a false statement in an application for an extreme risk protective order could be charged with a Class B misdemeanor and sentenced to up to six months in jail.
Those are strong assurances of due process, which shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Moody’s work in the field of criminal justice reform. Moody, who served as vice chair of the House Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting, has filed two other bills that will hopefully receive hearings this session.
If You Can’t Buy the Gun, You Can’t Load the Gun
House Bill 877
Moody’s HB 877 would make it a crime for someone who is prohibited from possessing a type of firearm to attempt to acquire a magazine — the removable part (sometimes called a “clip”) that holds the ammunition — for that type of firearm. This may seem redundant, but as a former prosecutor, Moody understands that this bill would provide law enforcement with a tool they could use against a would-be assailant even if they haven’t caught the person red handed.
If police pull over a convicted bank robber and find 50 loaded rifle magazines in his trunk, they shouldn’t have to wait to see if he actually puts those magazines into a gun. His acquiring magazines for a gun he isn’t allowed to own should be a crime in and of itself.
Guns Must Be Safely Stored So Kids Can’t Reach Them
House Bill 889
Moody’s HB 889 would expand Texas’ 1995 safe-storage law by changing the definition of “child” to mean “a person under the age of 18” rather than “a person under the age of 17.” Raising this age would ensure that parents can be held responsible if they negligently allow a 17-year-old who is too young to purchase a firearm to access one.
This issue revealed itself with deadly results in 2018, when a 17-year-old in Santa Fe, Texas, used two of his father’s guns to kill eight classmates and two teachers.
HB 889 would make two other changes: It would raise the penalty from a misdemeanor to a felony if the child uses the firearm to injure or kill someone outside the home (e.g., a school shooting), and it would create a clear exception to the offense if the child’s parent or guardian authorized him to use the gun for hunting or sporting purposes (a small win for gun rights activists).
