Face of Nation : Gov. Greg Abbott signed the measures after they were passed in a 2019 legislative session that the National Rifle Association, or NRA, called “highly successful” at the time, celebrating that the measures “will further loosen Texas’ permissive gun laws” and would send the “gun control crowd home empty-handed.”
Texas is home to almost 1.4 million holders of active firearm licenses, and five of the 20 deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 1900 have occurred in the state. Among them is the rampage in El Paso, where authorities said Monday that the number of deaths had risen to 22.
The NRA said its “deepest sympathies are with the families and victims” of the shootings in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed Sunday. The organization said it wouldn’t “participate in the politicizing of these tragedies.”
Texas had previously permitted approved foster parents to keep licensed firearms in their homes, but only if weapons and ammunition were stored in separate locked locations. The new law allows guns and ammunition to be stored together in the same locked location — a protocol that is discouraged by the pro-gun National Shooting Sports Foundation.
When the law was passed, the NRA’s lobbying group, the Institute for Legislative Action, or NRA-ILA, called it “just the first step toward restoring the Second Amendment rights of foster parents and their families.”
The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Donna Campbell, a Republican from New Braunfels, said in a statement that “those with evil intentions” would carry guns into churches regardless of the law. The NRA did suffer one defeat when Abbott signed the state budget bill, to which lawmakers had quietly added $1 million to fund a public campaign to promote safe storage of firearms.
A separate bill to fund the program had earlier been defeated under lobbying by the NRA, which argued that gun rights groups and gun manufacturers already organize similar initiatives and that state-run campaigns could be “corrupted” by anti-gun rhetoric.
