Children flee a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. The 18-year-old gunman gave off numerous warning signs prior to the attack.Pete Luna/Uvalde Leader-News

Everything is bigger in Texas—except, apparently, memory of devastating mass shootings.

In late June, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law the Anti-Red Flag Act, which preemptively bans the creation or enforcement of extreme risk protective orders. Such orders are legal tools used to temporarily prohibit a person from having access to guns after a judge evaluates evidence of alarming behavior and deems that person to be a danger to themselves or others.

Abbot and Republican state lawmakers have extensive knowledge of the harm that red flag laws are designed to prevent. Several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory took place in Texas, including when a suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in 2022. Three years earlier, a 21-year-old right-wing extremist killed 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso. In 2018, a high schooler fatally shot 10 and wounded 13 at Santa Fe High School near Houston. In 2017, a 26-year-old military veteran with a history of domestic violence killed 26 people and wounded 22 others at a Sutherland Springs church.

That’s only a partial list of these calamities in Texas over the past decade. (See also: the attack at an outlet mall in Allen, a rampage in Midland-Odessa, and a deadly ambush of police officers in Dallas.) Most, if not all, of these cases were preceded by observable warning behaviors from the perpetrators—red flags indicating that access to weapons made them dangerous.

In his public remarks about gun........

© Mother Jones