HOUSTON – After months of calling for more gun control measures, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children died in a mass shooting, the Republican leader of the state Senate told him to stop bringing up the legislation about weapons or was forbidden to speak. Absolutely not.
In the state House, Republican members talked and joked with each other as another Democrat, Representative Jarvis Johnson of Houston, rose to speak about gun control. “This is not a joke, this is real,” he said he shouted from the lectern Friday to his colleagues. “Children die every day.”
Just a few hours later, gunfire once again disrupted the daily lives of the people of Texas. This time violence erupted at a popular mall in the Dallas suburb of Allen, where a 33-year-old gunman armed with what officials said was an AR-15-style rifle quickly killed eight people and wounded at least seven people, among them. at least one child, before he was fatally shot by a police officer on Saturday.
The killings came just over a week after a mass shooting in rural San Jacinto County, north of Houston, where five people who lived together were killed by a neighbor after he asked him to stop shooting his gun in the front yard. And they occurred just under a year after the Uvalde massacre, where two teachers also died.
Among some Texans, the drumbeat of mass killing has fueled growing frustration and a slight openness to more gun regulation in a state where even Democrats proudly discuss their firearms. But the violence has done little to reshape the political realities at the state Capitol, where Republicans control both the legislative chambers and all state offices.
In the past two years, the state has been rocked by more than a dozen mass killings of four or more peopleTexas has increased access to firearms, eliminating permit requirements to carry handguns and lower the age at which adults can carry guns on the 18th of the 21st.
On Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, attended a vigil for the victims of the Allen Premium Outlets shooting, but earlier said there would be no new effort by his administration to limit access to firearms, because it wouldn’t work.
“We’ve seen an increase in the number of shootings in states with lax gun laws, as well as shootings in states with very strict laws,” said Mr. Abbott in an interview on Fox News. He said Texas was responding to the “dramatic increase in the amount of anger” in the United States by going to “its root cause, which is addressing the underlying mental health issues.”
The message was largely the same as the one the governor delivered the day after the Uvalde elementary school shooting in May 2022, when he noted during a news conference that every weekend there is a shooting in Chicago more people than in Texas schools.
Instead, President Biden urged action on Sunday. “Republican members of Congress cannot continue to face this epidemic with a shrug,” he said in a statement calling for “a bill to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines” .
In Texas, a bill to raise the age to buy an AR-15-style rifle to 21 from 18 has been presented by the Democrats and championed by relatives of the children killed in Uvalde, but was not likely to get out of committee before a legislative deadline Monday. That legislation would have prevented the 18-year-old gunman from Uvalde from buying the gun he used, but it would not have been a factor in the shooting in Allen, where the gunman was older.
On Sunday, investigators were still working to determine what motivated the gunman to open fire at the mall, about 25 miles north of Dallas. It was the second deadliest shooting of the year in the United States, after the massacre in Monterey Park, California, in which a gunman killed 11 people at a dance hall on January 21.
The Texas Department of Public Safety identified the gunman in Saturday’s attack as Mauricio Garcia, 33, of Dallas.
A video circulating on social media appeared to show him lying on the ground, dressed in black and equipped with what appeared to be a tactical vest, multiple rounds of ammunition and a long gun.
The gunman may have embraced white supremacist ideology, according to two law enforcement officials, but it was not yet known whether the shooting was an act of domestic terrorism.
He arrived at the large open-air mall on Saturday in the middle of the afternoon, got out of a silver sedan and around 3:30 p.m. began firing a rifle at shoppers walking outside.
According to video recorded at the scene, the gunshot sent people scrambling for safety. A police officer who had been on an unrelated assignment at the mall heard a gunshot, rushed toward it and fatally shot the gunman, Chief Brian E. Harvey of the Allen Police Department said Saturday.
Officers and agents from several law enforcement agencies, including local police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Texas Department of Public Safety, were still working Sunday to identify the victims and notify their families. The injured – who ranged in age from 5 to 61 – were being treated at three trauma centers, according to a spokesman for one of the centers, Medical City Healthcare.
No update on the investigation was provided Sunday, but gun control advocates in the state lamented the report of another episode of large-scale violence.
“This is no longer unimaginable,” Rep. Johnson said in an interview Sunday. “We’re almost on the verge of normalizing mass shootings in Texas, and that’s the most disturbing thing.”
Although they are less supportive of tighter gun regulation than Americans in general, Texans support some limited gun control measures, polls have shown, and in recent years opinions on guns among Republican voters in Texas have appeared to moderate somewhat. according to polls by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, 67 percent of Republicans told pollsters that more guns would make America safer. The following year, that percentage declined, and after the Uvalde shooting, it dropped again to 57 percent.
“You’re seeing a very slow erosion in some of the underlying attitudes that suggest a general enthusiasm for guns among Republicans,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project. “But it’s not going down enough to indicate a change, at least not yet.”
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said that after the elementary school massacre two of his Republican colleagues privately expressed to him their support for some kind of gun control measures . “But since then, nothing has changed,” he said in an interview on Sunday.
For months, Mr. Gutierrez has been trying to force action in the state Senate, a body dominated by its Republican leader, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who last month warned Mr. Gutierrez not to discuss control of guns during a debate on an unrelated bill. prohibit minors from drag shows.
“People don’t want to get rid of these guns, I understand that, and I have guns myself,” Gutierrez said. But there are steps that can be taken, he said, such as expanding background checks or raising the age to buy an AR-15-style rifle. “These are simple things,” he said.
In Allen on Sunday, Amy Bennett stood on the side of a road near Cottonwood Creek Church, where a vigil was being held for the victims of the shooting. He held a sign that read “This voter opposes gun violence,” with an image of an AR-15 crossed out. “Thoughts and prayers are useless,” said another sign pinned to his shirt. “The dead are still dead.”
Several cars honked as they passed.
For some Texans, like Annalisha Tiller, 48, a Republican who lives in the San Jacinto County neighborhood where last month’s mass shooting took place, the ease with which anyone can get a gun has made her feel unsafe and open to restrictions such as requiring background checks on guns purchased at gun shows.
“Access to guns is too easy here,” he said. At the same time, he arms himself every time he goes out, for safety. “We don’t have police here to protect us,” he said. “I want good people with guns.”
Mamie Lester, 59, a staunch Republican who lives on a 50-acre farm in North Texas, said she and her husband have more than a dozen guns — rifles, shotguns and pistols — that remain carefully locked at home when not in use. . But the killings in Allen, after other recent mass shootings, have deepened his sense that something needs to be done.
“I realize this is all out of control,” he said. “I’m not totally against gun control, but they’re trying to control it for the wrong people. You’ve got to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.” He said better background checks could be one answer.
Gregory K. Taggart, a firearms instructor at Texas Legends, a gun range in Allen near where the latest shooting occurred, echoed Gov. Abbott when he said mental health had to factor into any analysis of recent gun violence. “Guns have been around forever. Mass shootings haven’t been,” Mr. Taggart. “My first question would be: Why do we have mass shootings now? I think our society is falling apart.”
Restricting guns is not the answer, he added. “When people talk about drunk driving, do they say: Shall we ban cars?”
Part of the reason Texas Republicans may not feel political pressure on the issue is the state’s recent electoral history. The Uvalde shooting took place during a close gubernatorial race between Mr. Abbott, who is running for a third term, and Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic congressman who campaigned on some of the same gun control proposals recently introduced in the legislature. . Mr. Abbott won by a wide margin.
Last month, relatives of the Uvalde victims traveled to the State Capitol to testify on behalf of the bill to raise the age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle. The fact that a Republican-controlled House committee even agreed to hear them had felt like something of a victory.
Then they waited for hours for their turn to speak. They were finally called after 10 p.m., about 13 hours after arriving at the Capitol that morning.
“I remember May 24, 2022, when we waited for hours to be told our daughter was never coming home,” Kimberly Rubio told the committee through tears, talking about her daughter Lexie, who died in the shooting . “Then I expressed confusion and now I’m perplexed. Did you think we were going home?”
Mary Beth Gahan, Remy Tumin, Claire Fahy and Lauren McCarthy contributed to the report.
