Yesterday evening, former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor tweeted out a piece from NPR that, in Vietor’s description, contains “a quick list of all the ways TX Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans loosened Texas’s gun control laws in 2021 alone.” Vietor’s implication is that the changes that Texas made last year had something to do with the massacre in Uvalde, and that Governor Abbott and the Texas legislature therefore share some of the blame. This is false. Indeed, nothing Texas did in 2021 (or before) intersects with this atrocity at all.
Here’s the list to which Vietor linked. I’ll take its items one by one:
House Bill 1927: Known as permitless or constitutional carry, it allows Texans to carry handguns in public without a license and the background check and training that a license requires.
This bill made Texas’s concealed-carry permitting system optional. But it did not change the eligibility rules, which, with a handful of exceptions, require carriers to be 21-years-old. The shooter was 18, and therefore ineligible. Irrespective, under both federal law and Texas state law, schools are “gun-free zones.” Per Tex. Educ. Code § 37.007(b)(3)(B), “a student may be expelled if, while within 300 feet of school property, the student possesses a firearm.”
House Bill 2622: Known as the “Second Amendment Sanctuary State Act,” it prohibits state agencies and local governments from enforcing new federal gun rules.
This is a fairly standard anti-commandeering provision that applies the logic of Printz v. United States, and it has nothing to do with this case.
House Bill 1500: Prevents government entities from banning the sale or transportation of firearms or ammunition during a declared disaster or emergency.
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 957: Exempts firearm suppressors that are made and remain in Texas from federal laws and regulations.
This law asserts that certain federal gun regulations contained within the 1934 National Firearms Act do not apply to purely intrastate commerce. The shooter did not use a suppressor. It is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 1407: Allows license holders to carry visible, holstered handguns anywhere in a motor vehicle, rather than having to wear the handgun in a shoulder or belt holster.
This law is entirely unrelated. The shooter used a rifle.
House Bill 1387: Allows certain foster homes to store guns and ammunition together in the same locked location, rather than requiring the items to be stored separately.
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 1069: Allows certain first responders to carry handguns.
This law is entirely unrelated to what happened — although, if anything, it would potentially have helped in a situation such as Uvalde.
House Bill 2112: Removes the requirement that handguns must be carried in a “shoulder or belt” holster, expanding what kinds of holsters are legal.
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 103: Creates a statewide active shooter alert system.
This bill is related to what happened in Uvalde, and, clearly, it was designed to aid in situations such as Uvalde. It is not, as Vietor suggests, a “loosening” of “Texas’s gun control laws.”
House Bill 4346: Prohibits certain firearm restrictions on a property during the use of an easement.
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 29: Allows state-owned public buildings to provide self-service weapon lockers.
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 1920: Expands and clarifies what constitutes a secured area of an airport in relation to possessing a firearm.
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 2675: Requires the Texas Department of Public Safety to expedite the handgun license process for individuals “who are at increased risk of becoming victims of violence.”
This law is entirely unrelated.
House Bill 918: Makes young adults between the ages of 18-20 eligible for a license to carry a handgun if they are protected under certain court orders related to family violence.
This law could plausibly have applied here, given that the shooter was 18. But he didn’t get a license to carry a handgun — or even use a handgun — and it is therefore entirely unrelated to what happened.
House Bill 781: Allows junior college school marshals to carry concealed handguns rather than storing them.
This law is entirely unrelated.
Senate Bill 741: Allows school marshals in public school districts, open-enrollment charters, and private schools to carry concealed handguns rather than storing them.
This law didn’t affect what happened in Uvalde, but, if it had, it clearly would have helped to have had a school marshal on the premises who was allowed to conceal his gun, rather than store it in a lockbox.
Senate Bill 20: Allows hotel guests to carry and store firearms and ammunition in their rooms.
This law is entirely unrelated.
Senate Bill 19: Prohibits government entities from contracting with businesses that “discriminate against the firearm or ammunition industries.”
This law is entirely unrelated.
Senate Bill 162: Known as the “lie and try” bill, makes it a state crime to lie on a background check in order to illegally purchase a firearm.
This law is entirely unrelated, because the shooter passed a background check. It is also not a “loosening” of “Texas’s gun control laws,” but a tightening.
Senate Bill 313: Creates a sales and use tax exemption for firearm safety equipment.
This law is entirely unrelated. It is also not a “loosening” of “Texas’s gun control laws.”
Senate Bill 168: Requires schools to use best practices when conducting active shooter drills, so they’re less harmful to students’ mental health and wellbeing; went into effect immediately.
This law is related, but it’s designed to help in these situations. It cannot, in any sense, be cast as a “loosening” of “Texas’s gun control laws.”
I go through these examples not to pick on Vietor per se, but to point out just how enormously unhelpful — and, alas, typical — his contribution was. There is nothing remotely virtuous about shouting “do something,” and then pointing to a bunch of unrelated laws, and yet, inexplicably, this seems to be the go-to reaction from our most prominent gun-control activists each and every time this happens. Vietor doesn’t explain why any of the laws above are a problem. He doesn’t connect them, in any way, to Uvalde. He doesn’t connect them, in any way, to any other tragedy. He doesn’t know that, among them, was a strengthening of the background check system (Senate Bill 162) of exactly the sort that gun-control activists say they want. He doesn’t know that none of the other changes Texas has made to firearms law since Abbott won in 2014 — the legalization of open carry, for example — are also wholly unrelated. He just . . . gestures.
There are many problems with our national debates over firearms law, but this is probably the most potent among them. Last night, President Biden asked, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?” But, of course, nobody is “letting” this happen. We’d be “letting this happen” if (a) we knew how to fix it, and (b) if there were no tradeoffs involved in that obvious solution. But, much as Biden might wish them to be, neither (a) nor (b) is actually true. (a) is untrue because the responses that Biden and his party have in mind never seem to have anything to do with what has actually happened, and (b) is untrue because the only thing that would actually plausibly work — repealing the Second Amendment, and then relentlessly attempting to confiscate 450 million guns by force — would involve a level of political upheaval, government violence, and civic unrest that would make Prohibition look like a cakewalk.
The core insinuation of President Biden’s speech last night was that everyone secretly knows how to stop this from happening, but that some people don’t want to, and that the debate is therefore between people who care about the problem (Biden) and people who don’t (anyone who disagrees with Biden). This is false, self-aggrandizing, and grotesque. In truth, the key difference between President Biden and those who are skeptical of his proposals is that the skeptics aren’t prepared to pretend that they know how to fix this, and President Biden is. Worse still, President Biden is prepared to pretend that a set of completely unrelated policies would fix it, and the skeptics are not.
This is not mere conjecture. Shortly before President Biden spoke, Senator Schumer introduced a pair of bills that have nothing whatsoever to do with what happened in Ulvede. The first bill would mandate federal background checks on private intrastate gun transfers. The second would extend the waiting period for buyers who have been flagged by those checks. Neither bill even intersects with Ulvede — or, for that matter, with the vast majority of the other mass shootings of the last thirty years — and yet, in short order, the Democratic Party and the press will begin insisting vehemently that anyone who objects to them does not care about the problem at hand. There is no reason for Americans to buy this premise, or any other that is peddled by figures who are so fundamentally unserious about engaging with the problem as it exists.