After Mass Killings in Texas, Frustration but No Action on Guns

No update on the investigation was provided on Sunday, but gun control proponents in the state were deploring the report of yet another episode of large-scale violence.

“This is no longer unimaginable,” Representative Johnson said in an interview on Sunday. “We are almost to the point of normalizing mass shootings in Texas, and that is the most disturbing thing.”

While less supportive of stricter gun regulation than Americans as a whole, Texans support some limited gun control measures, polls have shown, and over the past few years views on guns among Republican voters in Texas have appeared to moderate somewhat, according to polls by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, 67 percent of Republicans told pollsters that more guns made the United States safer. The next year, that percentage declined, and, after the Uvalde shooting, it declined again, to 57 percent.

“You are seeing a very slow erosion in some of the underlying attitudes that suggest a blanket enthusiasm for guns among Republicans,” James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, said. “But it’s not dropping enough to signal a change, at least not yet.”

State Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said that after the elementary school massacre two of his Republican colleagues privately voiced support to him for some kind of gun control measures. “But since then, nothing has changed,” he said in an interview on Sunday.

For months, Mr. Gutierrez has been trying to force action in the State Senate, a body dominated by its Republican leader, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who warned Mr. Gutierrez last month against discussing gun control during a debate on an unrelated bill to ban minors from drag shows.

“People don’t want to eliminate these guns, I get it — and I own guns myself,” Mr. Gutierrez said. But there are steps that can be taken, he said, such as expanding background checks or raising the age to buy an AR-15-style rifle. “This is simple stuff,” he said.