Texas Senate Democrats are calling for a special session on gun control legislation

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The Democratic faction of the Texas Senate is asking Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special emergency legislative session to review a range of gun restrictions and safety measures following a mass shooting at a Uvalde school this week that left 19 children and two adults dead.

In a letter released Saturday morning, all 13 Senate Democrats called on lawmakers to pass legislation raising the minimum age for purchasing a firearm from 18 to 21. The Uvalde shooter was 18 years old and had bought two AR rifles which he used in the attack.

The caucus also calls for universal background checks on all firearms sales, “red flag” laws allowing a judge to temporarily remove firearms from anyone deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others, a “cooling off period” for the purchase of a firearm and high-capacity magazine regulations for citizens.

“Texas has suffered more mass shootings than any other state in the past decade. 26 people died in Sutherland Springs. 10 people died at Santa Fe High School. In El Paso, 23 people died in a Walmart. Seven people died in Midland-Odessa,” the leader reads. “After each of these mass killings, you held press conferences and roundtables promising things would change. After the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, those broken promises have never sounded more hollow. Now is the time to take real action.”

Such legislation is unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-controlled legislature, which has a track record of advocating legislation to relax gun restrictions. Only the governor has the authority to call the legislature back into session for emergencies.

Asked about a special session at a news conference in Uvalde on Friday, Abbott said “all options are on the table,” adding he believed legislation would ultimately be passed to address this week’s horrors. However, he suggested that the laws were tailored more towards mental health than gun control.

“You can expect a robust discussion and I hope there will be legislation that I will sign that will deal with healthcare in this state,” he said, “this status quo is unacceptable. This crime is unacceptable. We won’t be here and we won’t do anything about it.”

He opposed the idea of ​​increasing the age for buying a firearm, saying since Texas became a state, 18-year-olds could buy a gun.

He also opposed general background checks, saying existing background check policies did not prevent the Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs shootings, both of which occurred during his tenure.

“If everyone wants to pick up a certain strategy and say that’s the golden strategy, look at what happened in the Santa Fe shooting,” he said. “A background check had no relevance because the shooter took the gun from his parents… Anyone who is suggesting that we should focus on background checks and not mental health is wrong in my opinion.”

Since the Robb Elementary School massacre, the governor’s comments on possible solutions have focused on improving mental health services rather than restricting access to firearms.

In the letter, however, Senate Democrats criticized the governor for blaming a “broken mental health care system” – that you and other heads of state remain severely underfunded.

“We need evidence-based, sane gun safety laws. Without a doubt, if at least some of the above measures had been adopted since 2018, many lives could have been saved,” the caucus wrote.

Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

Following the 2018 Santa Fe school shooting, Abbott released a series of recommendations to improve school safety, including a call for the legislature to consider a “red flag” law.

At the time, Abbott, in his plan to improve school safety, claimed that similar safeguards restricting gun ownership could have prevented the mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, southeast of San Antonio, and Parkland, Florida.

But Lt. gov. Dan Patrick and gun rights activists pushed back and the proposal died.

By the end of the 2019 legislative session, Abbott signed into law a package of school safety measures that focused primarily on expanding mental health resources and “strengthening school buildings.” He expanded the number of school staff who were allowed to have a firearm on school property.

When he signed that law into law at the end of the 2019 session, reporters asked if he still supported a “red flag” bill.

Abbott said such a measure is not necessary in Texas “at the moment.”

On Friday, Roland Gutierrez, the Democratic State Senator representing Uvalde, interrupted Abbott’s press conference by walking outside the auditorium and urged the governor to bring the legislature back for three weeks.

“We’ve got to do something, man,” he told Abbott, the second Democratic politician to interrupt a news conference this week. “Just call us back.”

In the hours after Tuesday’s shooting, Gutierrez told the Texas Tribune that the state needed to make it harder to obtain a firearm, particularly the gun used by the shooter, an AR-15, which he described as a “weapon of mass destruction.”

“There isn’t a hunter in Texas that uses these types of weapons,” he said. “And so I’m not saying we should take away those types of guns, I’m saying we should have some bigger restrictions on access … When an 18-year-old boy gets his hands on those types of guns, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.” Sense.”