Texas forbids law that keeps guns away from unhinged people

Everything is bigger in Texas—except, apparently, memory of devastating mass shootings.

In late June, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill known as the Anti-Red Flag Act, which preemptively bans the creation or enforcement of extreme risk protective orders. Such orders are legal tools used to temporarily prohibit a person from having access to guns after a judge evaluates evidence of alarming behavior and deems that person to be a danger to themselves or others.

Abbot and Republican state lawmakers have extensive knowledge of the harm that red flag laws are designed to prevent. Several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory took place in Texas, including when a suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in 2022. Three years earlier, a 19-year-old right-wing extremist murdered 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso. In 2018, a high schooler fatally shot 10 and wounded 13 at Santa Fe High School near Houston. In 2017, a 26-year-old military veteran with a history of domestic violence massacred 26 people and wounded 22 others at a Sutherland Springs church.

That’s only a partial list of these calamities in Texas over the past decade. (See also: the attack at an outlet mall in Allen; a rampage in Midland-Odessa; and a deadly ambush of police officers in Dallas.) Most, if not all, of these cases were preceded by observable warning behaviors from the perpetrators—red flags indicating that access to weapons made them dangerous.

In his public remarks about gun violence and mass shootings, Abbott consistently has focused heavily on the role of mental illness, a tactic political conservatives often use to deflect arguments for stricter regulation of firearms. And while mental illness is not fundamentally the cause of mass shootings, the governor obviously is well aware that there can be identifiable individuals who should not have access to guns.

“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” he said as the state and nation reeled from Uvalde. Following the massacres in El Paso and Midland-Odessa, Abbot pledged to work with the legislature on laws “to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.” After the mall shooting in Allen, he spoke of the need to address “anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it. People want a quick solution. The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.”

Abbott himself once urged the state legislature to “consider the merits of adopting a red flag law,” after the Santa Fe High School shooting seven years ago.  

Texas legislators also know the reality behind these attacks—they were the first to publish an official investigative report on Uvalde, two months after the massacre, in July 2022. The 77-page state House report focused foremost on the disastrous tactical response, including how law enforcement officers waited more than an hour to confront the perpetrator inside the building. But it also summarized the perpetrator’s troubled background and detailed some of his warning behaviors leading up to the attack: A former girlfriend told the FBI that he’d been lonely and depressed and had “told her repeatedly that he wouldn’t live past eighteen, either because he would commit suicide or simply because he ‘wouldn’t live long.’” The perpetrator also began wearing black clothes and combat boots, the Texas House report said, and his online activity “reflected themes of confrontation and revenge.” It continued:

The attacker began to demonstrate interest in gore and violent sex, watching and sometimes sharing gruesome videos and images of suicides, beheadings, accidents, and the like, as well as sending unexpected explicit messages to others online. Those with whom he played video games reported that he became enraged when he lost. He made over-the-top threats, especially towards female players, whom he would terrorize with graphic descriptions of violence and rape.

Yet despite those and other red flags, the perpetrator had been able to purchase an arsenal—legally—within just days of turning 18 years old. As the Texas House report also detailed:

An online retailer shipped 1,740 rounds of 5.56mm 75-grain boat tail hollow point to his doorstep, at a cost of $1,761.50. He ordered a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 (an AR-15-style rifle) for shipment to a gun store in Uvalde, at a cost of $2,054.28. On May 17, 2022, he bought a Smith and Wesson M&P15 (also an AR-15-style rifle) at the same store in Uvalde, at a cost of $1,081.42. He returned the next day for 375 rounds of M193, a 5.56mm 55-grain round with a full metal jacket, which has a soft core surrounded by a harder metal. He returned again to pick up his other rifle when it arrived on May 20, 2022, and he had store staff install the holographic sight on it after the transfer was completed.

Four days later, 19 children and two teachers were dead.

Opponents often make a blanket argument that red flag laws are unconstitutional and deprive citizens of due process. In reality, evidence of threatening behavior must be presented to a civil court judge, who rules on whether or not to remove access to guns on a temporary basis; to varying degree there is also a petitioning or review process for potential restoration of access. And while the US Supreme Court has not addressed red flag laws directly, in 2023 it ruled on a Texas case about gun rights and domestic violence restraining orders: “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”

The core function of red flag laws, in other words, is not deprivation of firearms but rather the twin purposes of protecting the community and getting the troubled person help.

With the growth of these laws over the past decade—22 states and Washington, DC, now have some version of the policy—research in California and beyond has shown that they are effective for reducing suicides and targeted shootings. Last year, as I completed a deep investigation into the 2014 mass attack in Isla Vista, California—which gave rise to the state’s pioneering red flag law—violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office told me that the law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of the threat management cases that we’ve worked.”

The senior US senator in Texas, Republican John Cornyn, was the lead cosponsor of the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act authorized by Congress in 2022. Signed into law by President Biden but now jeopardized under President Trump, that legislation included $750 million in grant funding for states to implement crisis-intervention programs and policies, including red flag laws. Cornyn did not respond to my request for comment about his state’s Anti-Red Flag Act, which takes effect on Sept. 1.

When the next major mass shooting occurs in Texas, it’s likely to be followed once again by a Texas-size round of “thoughts and prayers,” as Ted Cruz, the state’s other Republican US senator and a vocal opponent of red flag laws, can well attest.

Likely even bigger, though, will be the missed opportunity to have prevented yet another round of carnage and devastation.