NRA celebrates ‘highly successful’ year in Texas as new gun bills signed into law | Texas Legislature

AUSTIN — It will soon be easier to carry guns in Texas churches, schools, apartment buildings and disaster zones.

Sunday was the deadline for Gov. Greg Abbott to approve or veto bills passed during the 2019 meeting of the Texas Legislature, which wrapped up late last month. An effort to do away with the state’s gun licensing rules failed to reach his desk, but Abbott signed several bills that will further loosen Texas’ permissive gun laws.

Pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association said the session was very successful.

“The good bills passed. The bad bills didn’t,” Alice Tripp, a lobbyist with the Texas State Rifle Association, the NRA’s official affiliate in Texas, said Monday. “We worked real, real hard.”

The GOP-dominated Legislature declined to ban bump stocks, pass red flag laws or close the so-called gun show loophole, but did set aside $1 million for a gun storage public safety campaign in the wake of two mass shootings in the last two years. A bipartisan bill to restrict guns at airports passed, but Abbott vetoed it.

Here’s a rundown of which gun laws passed and which ones didn’t.

What bills passed?

Beginning Sept. 1, Texans who can legally own firearms will be to able to carry their handguns, open or concealed, for a full week after a state or natural disaster is declared. The bill was filed in response to calls from pro-gun groups who said Texans couldn’t arm themselves when Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in 2017. 

Under current state law, Texans who can legally own a firearm don’t need an additional license to openly carry a long gun, like an AR-15, but they do need a license to carry a handgun. 

Also beginning Sept. 1, landlords won’t be able to ban renters from having guns in their apartments, and the state will no longer cap the number of armed marshals that can be designated at each public school campus.

The state’s list of gun-free zones will also get a bit shorter that day. 

Churches, mosques and synagogues in Texas have been off-limits to gun owners, unless the congregation’s leader expressly allowed firearms. On Sept. 1, that restriction will be lifted and houses of worship will be required to give notice in order to ban guns. This effort was spurred by the November 2017 massacre of 26 people, including a pregnant woman, at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs.

Abbott also approved several other laws to clear up gun storage rules at foster care homes and in cars parked at public schools, and to give legal cover to armed Texans who accidentally enter gun-free zones.

Tara Mica, the regional lobbyist for the NRA, called this year “highly successful.”

“When you get 10 pro-Second Amendment bills to the governor and he signs them all, I would rank it up there with one of the most successful sessions we’ve had since I’ve been doing this,” Mica said Monday.

This weekend, Abbott also approved the $251 billion state budget without making any changes. He has the authority to ax any single expenditure in the budget, but he approved $1 million to be used for a public awareness campaign advocating for safe gun storage.

Elected officials had discussed how to improve gun storage laws after a teenager shot and killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School near Houston last summer. The shooter, a junior at the school, was armed with his father’s shotgun and .38-caliber revolver.

What bills didn’t pass?

Gun control advocates could claim few victories this year. 

In addition to the public safety campaign, an effort do away with the state gun licensing rules failed to gain traction this year after Speaker of the House Dennis Bonnen, a Republican, blasted its supporters for their pressure tactics. But their other efforts, from banning bump stocks to expanding gun-free zones, failed.  

And Elva Mendoza, the deputy leader of the Texas chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, worried the new laws Abbott has signed will make people less safe.

“We definitely have our continued work cut out for us,” Mendoza said. She said she hoped lawmakers would keep guns out of the hands of abusive spouses and pass so-called red flag laws to seize firearms from people the courts decide might be a danger to themselves or others, but they did not. “These are things that we are going to be working on over time.”

The NRA affiliate in Texas had 160 bills on its watch list this year. While gun control efforts failed, Tripp said she was surprised to see some old favorites of the Democrats, like requiring private sellers to be federally licensed, come back this year.

“It’s been a decade since we’ve seen some of this stuff that’s been filed in Texas,” she said of the effort to close the gun show loophole.

Rep. Rafael Anchia said he knew this legislation had little chance of gaining the approval of the mostly-Republican Legislature. But the Dallas Democrat, who filed several gun control bills this year, did not expect Abbott to kill the bill he filed to restrict guns at airports, which received bipartisan support.

The governor vetoed House Bill 1168 because it “would impose an unacceptable restraint on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding travelers,” Abbott wrote in a statement. “The Legislature may have intended simply to keep firearms off the tarmac, but the bill as drafted would newly prohibit carrying in any part of the airport terminal building, even ahead of the TSA inspection checkpoint.”

Anchia said the governor’s interpretation of his bill was wrong. It would have made it a crime for unauthorized people to carry guns on the tarmac or plane boarding ramps, he said, a change officials at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and lawmakers from both parties supported.

Anchia even worked with gun groups to ensure they wouldn’t ask Abbott to veto the bill.

“We bent over backwards,” Anchia said. “This is an agreed-to bill that has broad bipartisan support and we couldn’t even get this done, so I am highly pessimistic that we can get any reasonable gun safety bills passed in the Texas Legislature with this governor in place.”