AUSTIN, Texas — Gun control never got a floor debate in either chamber of the Legislature this session in Texas, but advocates for additional gun control measures, such as the Texas Coalition To End Gun Violence, are counting small victories as steps toward eventual passage of common sense gun laws.

The coalition, an umbrella group of 23 organizations, was formed in 2015 to find common ground on gun legislation. In the intervening sessions, attempts to pass red flag laws have failed and constitutional carry has passed. But Nicole Golden of Texas Gun Sense sees some progress in the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary, which left 19 children and two teachers dead almost a year ago, on May 24, 2022.

“We have mobilized thousands and thousands of supporters who called, emailed and visited lawmakers,” Golden said during a Tuesday news conference. “This session, we moved a historic vote out of committee with a bipartisan vote on HB 2744, which would raise the age to 21 to purchase semi-automatic rifles, and we did that as a coalition, standing side-by-side with survivors. We made the promise we would do that this session, and we followed through.”

The closest the coalition got to passing additional safeguards on guns was Senate Bill 728, linking a state and federal database on mental health background checks for firearms purchases. The bill added a section to the government code that would allow the Department of Public Safety to forward mental health information of juveniles who are unfit to carry a firearm because of mental illness or intellectual capability to the database for federal firearms background checks.

It’s also already part of federal law, so it did nothing more to extend gun safety, Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, told his colleagues in the Senate last week when he wanted to attach House Bill 2744. HB 2744 was a bill to prohibit the sale of certain semi-automatic weapons to people under the age of 21. The shooter in Uvalde was an 18-year-old high school dropout who bought his weapons on his 18th birthday.

“You know, a year ago today, we didn’t know about Uvalde,” Golden said. “But we knew about El Paso, Santa Fe, Sutherland Springs, Midland/Odessa and the thousands of gun deaths every year in Texas. And whether it’s next session or the session after that, we will be back stronger, more mobilized, more organized than every to push for common sense gun reform until it’s a reality in Texas, and we can live our lives free from the threat of gun violence in places that we should feel safe.”

Here are some of the other minor victories the coalition claimed during the 88th session:

First, the lawmaker who carried House Bill 2744 had never voted on the side of restricting gun sales. In past sessions, Rep. Tracy King, D-Uvalde, has concentrated most of his bills on either water issues or local government. In this session, he chaired Natural Resources and sat on the two select committees that Speaker Dade Phelan appointed after the Uvalde tragedy: Community Safety and Youth Health & Safety.

“We had some shift in opinions,” said Rep. Vicki Goodwin, D-Austin, who lost her father to gun violence in 1990. “For example, the author of the bill to raise the age for purchasing semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21 previously had not been in favor of that legislation. Unfortunately, it took a tragedy in his own community for him to change his mind.”

Two Republicans also voted to pass the bill out of the Select Committee on Community Safety: Justin Holland, R-Rockwall, and Sam Harless, R-Spring. Holland also co-authored legislation that would allow retired judges to carry firearms in places where active judges can carry firearms. 

“This is a movement. All movements take an incredibly long time,” Goodwin said. “It takes a lot of pressure, it takes consistency. And I am here to continue the job.”

Second, mental health advocates such as NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, are pushing back on the narrative offered by Gov. Greg Abbott that incidents such as the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School or at the Allen Premium Outlets Center are the result of mental illness or mental health problems. After the Allen mass shooting, Abbott told Fox News Sunday that Texas was working to address the root cause of incidents of violence, which were the mental health problems behind it. He called the push for additional gun control laws unconstitutional in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down New York concealed carry laws.

Greg Hansch, executive director of NAMI Texas, told reporters on Tuesday morning that mental illnesses are discrete, treatable medical conditions; not moral failings or character flaws. The mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary led to a bipartisan push among Texas lawmakers to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in mental health reform, but the effort also left a lot on the table to be addressed about mass shootings, Hansch said. 

“We all know what has happened since then. More mass shootings, more identification of mental illness as the problem and more mixed results in policymaking,” Hansch said.

Lawmaker efforts on mental health are appreciated, but aren’t the full answer to the gun violence currently happening in Texas, Hansch said.

“We reject the notion that the sole solution to preventing mass shootings is improving mental health policies,” Hansch said. “Researchers have found that only 8% of mass shooters had serious mental illness. Addressing mental illness must be part of a much broader conversation about preventing gun violence.”

The Legislature, advocates say, needs to address the problem at hand: It’s easier to get a gun than it is to get mental health care. And the bigger concern of the mental health community is self-directed gun violence, or the rise in suicides with the use of a firearm.

“Let me be clear here. Radicalism is not a mental illness. Terrorism is not a mental illness, and hate is not a mental illness,” Hansch said. “There is no reliable psychiatric cure for angry, often young, men with access to guns who are committed to perpetuating violence.”

The third difference in this session’s gun discussions is the inclusion of more people who own and use guns. Steven Kling, a gun owner and combat veteran, is a member of Giffords Gun Owners for Safety. He said the gun debate has been hijacked by the gun lobby and marketing campaigns that perpetuate irresponsible cowboy fantasies.

“Those ‘good guy with a gun’ fantasies should have been laid to rest with the children of Uvalde, but they persist,” Kling said. “When testifying before this legislative body, I’ve spent countless hours with survivors, people this government has failed in the most profound way you can fail a citizen, choosing an industry and its profits over the lives and the pursuit of happiness of its people.”

Kling, who ran for a seat in the Texas Senate in 2018, also spread some blame to lawmakers who continued to draw redistricting maps in ways to keep their seats.

“The representatives of this building have chosen to create districts that ensure their reelection, but in doing so have placed themselves in a hostage situation to the most extreme elements of their party, drowning out the voices of reason,” Kling said. “They chose personal ambition over what’s right for the rest of us. And the result is a government incapable of responding to the will of the majority. So, to the 9.6 million registered Texas voters who didn’t show up in the last election, please ask yourselves this, ‘Is it really going to take the murder of my own child for me to do something?’”