Biden urges gun safety; Texas Republicans eye permitless carry
Another week, another mass shooting in America. On Thursday, the news came from Bryan: a gunman killed one person and wounded five others at a cabinet manufacturing plant, then wounded a state trooper while fleeing the scene.
It would be naive to expect such a tragedy to lead to some kind of sea change. But it should give Texas voters a moment’s pause, at least, especially with state lawmakers on track to expand gun rights this session.
This might well be the year that permitless carry comes to Texas, for one thing. Another measure, which has the support of Gov. Greg Abbott, would make this a “Second Amendment Sanctuary State,” meaning that state agencies would effectively be directed to ignore any new federal rules and legislation that may come down the pike.
And, sad to say, the fate of these measures may have as much to do with national politics as with what’s best for, or preferred by, the people of this state .
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a first round of executive actions on gun safety, as many Democrats have been calling on him to do since his inauguration in January.
“Gun violence in this country is an epidemic, and it’s an international embarrassment,” Biden said, adding that “no amendment is absolute.”
The latter phrase gave some conservatives the vapors, but Biden was merely restating a point made by legions of legal scholars from all corners of the ideological spectrum.
His orders, too, are far less sweeping than they might have been. Biden ordered the Justice Department to issue a couple of new rules, including one to study the proliferation of “ghost guns” — those assembled from a kit, at home, and accordingly lacking a serial number. He also ordered DOJ to come up with a template “red flag” law for use by states that might be interested in passing such legislation. Such laws allow family members or police
to seek a court order to prevent a person in crisis from accessing firearms for a period of time.
All things considered, it would be disingenuous to pretend that Biden is indulging in executive overreach. And yet.
In a tweet, Gov. Greg Abbott denounced Biden’s announcement as “a new liberal power grab to take away our guns.”
“It's time to get legislation making (Texas) a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary State passed and to my desk for signing,” the governor continued.
Abbott, it should be noted, has not always espoused such a hard-line stance on the issue. In
2014, while campaigning for governor, he advocated expanding gun rights, but with certain caveats. He supported allowing guns on the campuses of public colleges and universities, for example, with the proviso that universities should be able to opt out; the campus carry legislation he signed in 2015 did not include such a proviso.
More recently, Abbott’s made occasional gestures to the gun-safety crowd — a large one in the general electorate, if not the subset of Texans who vote in Republican primaries.
After eight students and two teachers died in a mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in May 2018, Abbott issued a school and firearm safety action plan. One recommendation was that legislative leaders be encouraged to consider the merits of a “red flag” law, of the type that Biden has called on Congress to pass. In an October 2019 poll from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune, 68 percent of respondents expressed support for such a measure.
“The (L)egislature should consider whether the existing protective order laws are sufficient, or could be amended to include emergency risk protection, or whether emergency risk protective orders should be independently created,” the plan said, after stipulating that any such measures should include appropriate due process protections.
It’s hard to see what’s changed since then, other than Abbott’s political calculus. In May 2018, he was running for a second term as governor, which he ultimately won easily. He has yet to draw an opponent for 2022, assuming he decides to run again, and is thought to be interested in running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. If so, his record of expanding gun rights in Texas would presumably appeal to primary voters across the country.
Of particular concern to the women and men of the grassroots gun safety movement Moms Demand is House Bill 1911, a permitless carry bill, which passed out of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety last week. The bill would allow Texans who would otherwise be eligible to carry a handgun to do so without obtaining a license, as is currently required. It is authored by state Rep. James White, a Republican of Hillister, and has nearly 50 joint and co-authors, all of them Republican.
In recent years, the push for permitless carry, also referred to as “constitutional carry,” has been scuttled in the Texas House by the leaders of that chamber as much as its members. In 2019, for example, then-Speaker Dennis Bonnen declared the legislation in question “dead” after one of its proponents approached the homes of several lawmakers, including his own — an aggressive and obviously objectionable tactic. (“If you want to talk about issues and you want to advocate, you do it in this building. You don’t do it at our residences,” Bonnen explained.)
Advocates on both sides of the issue should expect HB 1911 to get a floor debate this year, according to Enrique Marquez, communications director for Speaker Dade Phelan, a Beaumont Republican.
“Hearing different viewpoints is a hallmark of the Texas House, and makes the chamber and ultimately legislation stronger,” Marquez told me, adding that Phelan himself “has a record of defending the Second Amendment.”
That’s fair — and Texans who have a view on the legislation at hand, for or against, should consider taking a moment to contact their representatives.
In the House, at least, there will be a chance for substantive debate over measures expanding gun rights. But the governor’s recent statements should leave no doubt that he’ll sign any legislation lawmakers send him.