Texas has “gaping loopholes” in its gun laws

When Devin Kelley gunned down 26 people in a Texas church on Sunday, he used a Ruger AR assault-type rifle, according to officials.

Texas doesn’t restrict assault-style weapons, the type of firearm used in the mass shootings in Orlando, Florida, last year; San Bernardino, California; and Newtown, Connecticut. In fact, like many other states, Texas has few laws regulating gun ownership and sale at all. The state has passed just five major pieces of gun legislation in the last 25 years, according to one study.

“It has several gaping loopholes that are shared by many other states,” said Lindsay Nichols, federal director of policy for Giffords Law Center, which gave Texas an “F” on its 2016 report evaluating states’ fights against gun violence. That year, Texas enacted both an open-carry law, which allows certain handgun owners to wear their firearms openly and a campus-carry law.

Among those loopholes is also that Texas doesn’t universally require firearm dealers to use state resources to run a background check on all potential buyers. Instead, firearm dealers must go directly to the FBI to conduct a background check using its federal database. If the FBI doesn’t get back to that seller within three business days, the buyer is allowed to purchase the weapon anyway. That’s what happened to Dylann Roof, who later shot and killed nine black parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.

Kelley, however, did undergo a background check, which a law enforcement official told CNN didn’t reveal any disqualifying information, though Kelly had once been convicted for domestic violence. That’s likely because the conviction happened in the military court system and didn’t translate.

Plus, if a Texas firearm dealer doesn’t operate across states or countries, they’re not required to be federally licensed and hence don’t need to do background checks at all, even at gun shows, according to Michael Siegal, who authored a Boston University study that tracked the number of state gun laws in Texas. That’s often referred to as the “gun show” loophole.

“There are also friends selling to other friends. There are people who maybe sell out of the back of their cars,” he explained, “so there’s all kinds of private transactions that can take place where people aren’t necessarily licensed dealers but are still selling a fair number of firearms.”

In 2016, Boston University School of Public Health researchers developed a database of 133 types of state gun laws, including regulations on dealers, ammunition, and firearm trafficking. Texas had just 18 such regulations, only five of which were enacted since 1991. But Texas lags far behind states with similar population sizes. New York has 75 regulations, while California leads the nation with 104. States near Texas also have relatively few gun regulations: New Mexico has 10, for example, while Louisiana has 12.

“We kind of have a two-tiered system of gun regulations. There are states that have very high number of laws and there are states that have very few,” Siegel said. “Texas is definitely at the very low end of the spectrum.”

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The number of gun regulations that a state enacts, however, don’t necessarily reveal how effective a state is at preventing gun violence. Despite its relatively lax gun policies, the rate of gun deaths in Texas is just slightly above the national average. In 2015, 11.7 people out of every 100,000 died of gun violence in Texas; the national average was 11.1 people out of every 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one of out every three Texans own a gun, according to a 2015 study in the journal Injury Prevention, also just above the national average.

It’s unclear, though, if Texas’ rate of gun deaths went up in 2016. The national average rose to about 12 gun deaths per 100,000 people, according to a CDC report released Friday. But the that report didn’t break down the data by state.

It’s also unclear what kinds of laws, exactly, will help stop mass shootings.

“We don’t have a lot of data about… laws that will specifically help prevent mass shootings,” Siegel said. “We have to just look at the overall picture of gun violence, and what’s very clear is when people have easier access to guns, there are higher rates of homicide.”

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Cover image: A supporter of open carry gun laws wears a pistol as he prepares for a rally in support of open-carry gun laws at the Texas capitol building in Austin, on Jan. 26, 2015. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)