August 11, 2019

On the Heels of Another Massacre, Texas Is Loosening Gun Laws

“We worked real, real hard,” an NRA lobbyist said in June.

header image of El Paso memorial

John Locher/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

New, looser gun laws will go into effect in the state of Texas in September, just before the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting that killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart.

Texas already has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation. But for Republican lawmakers during the state’s last legislative session, that wasn’t enough. A series of gun-friendly bills passed earlier this year and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott expands the number of places gun owners can possess their weapons.

One of the laws reduces penalties for those who carry guns in places of worship, including churches, synagogues, and mosques, that ban firearms. (In November 2017, a gunman at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killed 26 people and injured 20 using a semiautomatic rifle.) Others target schools: allowing districts to appoint more armed “school marshals” and making sure they can’t ban licensed gun owners from keeping guns or ammunition in a locked car in school parking lot, as long as the firearms are out of plain view. (In May 2018, a teenager used a shotgun and a revolver to kill nine students and a teacher at Santa Fe High School outside of Houston.)

Still more new laws will make it easier for gun owners to store firearms and ammunition in foster homes, and prevent landlords from banning guns on rental property. For a full week after natural disasters, it will no longer be a crime for Texans to carry handgun a without a license.

But perhaps just as important are the Texas gun bills that didn’t pass last legislative session: “red flag” laws, bans on bump stocks, an attempt to close the “gun-show loophole,” according to the Dallas News. Abbott also vetoed an additional bill to restrict guns at airports.

“We worked real, real hard,” a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association’s Texas affiliate told the Dallas News in June. According to USA Today, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action lobbied for all of the bills going into effect in September. 

“We will not participate in the politicizing of these tragedies,” the organization said in a different statement last weekend, after the two mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. “As always, we will work in good faith to pursue real solutions that protect us all from people who commit these horrific acts.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate