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AUSTIN — The shootings happened exactly four weeks apart.
First, in El Paso, where a North Texas man drove hundreds of miles to the border city intent on stopping a “Hispanic invasion” and killed 23 people.
Then, a few Saturdays later, in a shooting spree across the West Texas cities of Midland and Odessa, a gunman killed seven people and injured 25 with an illegally acquired firearm before being gunned down by police.
In the aftermath of August 2019, Texas was in mourning. Even pro-gun Republicans, like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, seemed willing to risk political capital to address mass shootings.
Abbott vowed to do everything he could to “make sure a crime like this doesn’t happen again.” Patrick said he was “willing to take an arrow” from the NRA to ensure background checks were required when firearms were sold between strangers.
Then, COVID-19 arrived in Texas and state officials shifted their energy to managing a pandemic and reviving a struggling economy. Like most things, addressing mass shootings fell as a priority.
But for lawmakers from those areas, the sense of urgency remains.
“We have family members of victims and survivors living in our communities,” said Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa. “While other news events are dominating the headlines, the scars are still in our communities.”
Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said the pandemic has rightfully taken up much of the legislative discussion but preventing mass shootings remains a priority for him and his colleagues.
“In our minds it does not deter from the importance of addressing hate-filled rhetoric and how it intersects with gun violence,” he said. “The lens through which El Pasoans view the world changed forever on Aug. 3, 2019.”
Gun legislation
In El Paso, a Democratic stronghold, lawmakers are going straight at gun control.
State Rep. Lina Ortega, a Democrat, has filed several bills around access to assault rifles like the one used by the El Paso shooter. One bill would raise the age for possession of assault rifles from 18 to 21. Another would ban their open display in public spaces. A third proposal would ban assault rifles altogether.
“Everything I’ve seen indicates that Texas as a whole supports these kinds of bans,” she said. “There’s no reason to have assault weapons in any community.”
Andi Turner, legislative director for the Texas State Rifle Association disagrees. She said her group opposes Ortega’s bills because they could criminalize law-abiding gun owners who own semi-automatic hunting rifles because the term “assault rifle” is overly broad.
“My hunting rifle is a black gun that is a semi-automatic,” Turner said. “Somebody that didn’t know better would say that’s an AR.”
Turner’s group also plans to oppose legislation by Rep. Art Fierro, D-El Paso, which would allow people experiencing mental illness complications to temporarily waive their right to buy or possess a gun by registering on a state database.
While other lawmakers, including Moody, have proposed red flag laws that would allow courts to take guns from a person deemed dangerous, Fierro said his proposal was a first step to provide some gun safety options.
“To me, this is not only a gun bill but it’s also a mental health awareness bill,” he said.
But Turner’s group said they oppose the bill because they fear Texans could face difficulty getting off the databases.
Still, El Paso lawmakers say they are confident they will see some movement on gun issues. Sen. César Blanco, a Democrat, said one of his proposals mirrors a recommendation provided by Abbott in his Texas Safety Action Report in Sept. 2019.
In that report, Abbott asked lawmakers to crack down on criminals who try to illegally buy or possess firearms. Blanco’s “lie and try” bill would make it a state crime to knowingly make a false statement for the purposes of passing a gun background check.
Such an offense is already a federal crime but because the feds are short-staffed, these cases are rarely prosecuted, Blanco said. His bill would allow state prosecutors to go after such crimes.
The Midland-Odessa shooter failed a background check when trying to buy a gun in 2014. The system flagged him because a court had deemed him mentally unfit to buy a gun. He then bought a gun in a private sale in 2016, which doesn’t require a background check.
Ortega has filed legislation to close that background check loophole. She said her bill is based on Patrick’s call to create a background check requirement for stranger-to-stranger sales. Ortega has tracked Patrick’s public comments and written them into the bill, creating exclusions for gifts between family members and sales to police officers, she said.
Neither Abbott nor Patrick responded to requests for comment.
The absence of the issue from discussions on legislative priorities has not gone unnoticed.
“I was certainly disappointed that neither El Paso or Odessa was mentioned in the State of the State,” Moody said. “That is a wound that’s still open and to heal that wound is going to take some work. It would have been nice to have some words for those communities.”
Enrique Marquez, a spokesman for House Speaker Dade Phelan said lawmakers will differ on how to best accomplish their goals but Phelan “looks forward to robust and respectful debate on important issues like access to mental health resources and mass violence prevention.”
“The Texas House maintained its commitment to public safety and mental health in its base budget, and the chamber will consider many proposals about how our state can better prevent and respond to terrible tragedies like mass violence,” Marquez said.
Gyl Switzer, executive director of the gun control group Texas Gun Sense, said lawmakers need to be willing to spend their political capital on the issue.
“After the El Paso shooting and then Midland-Odessa, I said ‘OK the whole El Paso delegation is Democrats, the whole Midland-Odessa delegation is Republicans. Now we’re going to solve this,’” she said. “I have been disappointed.”
Active shooter alerts
Not all the legislative proposals are centered around guns.
In the aftermath of the Midland-Odessa shootings, Landgraf said he worked with law enforcement officials and the families of victims to craft legislation he believes could save lives.
His bill would create an active shooter alert system that would notify Texans within 50 miles of an active shooter once a local law enforcement agency reported it to the Department of Public Safety.
Such an alert could have saved the life of Leila Hernandez, a 15-year-old girl who was the youngest victim of the Midland-Odessa shootings.
“Leila was killed about an hour after the shooting began. She had a cell phone in her hand,” Landgraf said. “It’s a really good example of how an active shooter alert system with push notifications to mobile phones could be tremendously beneficial.”
Landgraf said he crafted the bill with input from Hernandez’s family. He plans to call the bill “Leila’s law.”
Rep. Mary González, D-El Paso, is proposing a “digital citizenship” bill that would teach Texas school children about identifying hate speech, racism and discrimination on the internet in an effort to prevent online radicalization. The El Paso shooter posted his racist thoughts on internet forums.
“We know that this person decided to travel 500 miles away to come to my community to shoot Latino people. Why did that happen?” she said. “A lot of that happened because this young person fell down the deep dark spiral of the internet. This can be prevented if we give young people the tools to navigate the internet in a safe way.”
Despite silence from Texas Republican leaders on the shootings, González said she still believes the issues can be addressed.
“There’s still some space,” she said. “It will be harder than if it wasn’t a COVID year but still possible.”