Democrats spent the campaign promising Texans affordability. On the first day of bill filing for the 90th Legislature, they filed red flag gun confiscation, gun registration and gun bans instead.
Democratic lawmakers filed at least 22 bills on November 9 that would restrict law-abiding gun owners. You can see every bill on Texas Gun Rights’ public bill tracker.
Red Flag Gun Confiscation, Statewide
The centerpiece is Rep. Ann Johnson’s HB 218. A family or household member, or a police officer, files a sworn application alleging you are dangerous because of a serious mental illness.
If a judge finds “reasonable cause” in that paperwork alone, the judge may issue an order “without further notice to the respondent and without a hearing,” according to the bill text.
Under that temporary order, a judge can force you to surrender your guns within 24 hours, turn over your License to Carry and submit to a mental health examination. You may wait up to 14 days for a hearing. The final order lasts a year and can be renewed.
No crime. No charge. Your guns are gone before you can answer the accusation.
HB 218 also repeals Chapter 7C of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Anti-Red Flag Act Texas passed in 2025 to ban red flag orders in this state.
“This is what we’ve been warning gun owners of,” said Texas Gun Rights President Chris McNutt.
“On day one, the gun confiscation lobby and their puppets filed a bill that would not only undo our ban on red flag laws, but implement a statewide red flag law that takes your guns without any crime, without a conviction and before you ever get your day in court. There is no common ground on confiscation, and Republicans in the Senate had better not go looking for any.”
Moody’s HB 660 piles on, ordering people under protective orders or bond conditions, many never convicted of anything, to dispose of every gun they own within 10 days.
Gun Registration Through the Back Door
HB 613 by Rep. Suleman Lalani makes it a crime to sell or give a gun to anyone unless the transfer runs through a federally licensed dealer’s background check.
The bill text writes in no exception for family. Hand your son a shotgun and you could face a Class A misdemeanor. That is universal gun registration.
Rep. Joe Moody’s HB 659 forces dealers to report anyone who buys two or more guns, or four or more magazines, within five business days. The report, including a copy of the buyer’s ID, goes to DPS, which must send it to the buyer’s county sheriff within 24 hours.
The bill promises the data won’t be used for a registry, then exempts the federal background check system and state and national crime databases from that promise.
A government file on gun buyers is a registry.
Gun Bans, Starting With Young Adults
Sen. Judith Zaffirini’s SB 80 makes it a crime for Texans under 21 to buy or possess an “assault weapon,” defined broadly enough to cover AR-15s with a pistol grip or adjustable stock, semi-auto shotguns with detachable magazines, and pistols with threaded barrels.
Lalani’s HB 606 goes further: no Texan under 21 could buy or possess any firearm at all. A 20-year-old with a deer rifle becomes a criminal. If a law-abiding Texan is old enough to fight and die for this country, they are old enough to be trusted with a firearm.
HB 610 (Lalani) bans transferring any gun to adults under 21. HB 173 (Moody), HB 857 (Rep. Rafael Anchía), HB 806 (Rep. Ron Reynolds) and HB 771 (Rep.-elect Pooja Sethi) make selling semi-auto rifles to them a state jail felony. Sethi’s version has no exceptions at all, not even for military, police or a parent’s loan. Sen. Roland Gutierrez’s SB 308 bans 3D-printed guns and makes it a crime to share the files.
More Gun-Free Zones
Rep. Erin Gámez’s HB 712 cracks open state preemption so cities and counties can ban guns in public libraries, with no exemption for License to Carry holders. Rep.-elect Samantha Lopez-Resendez’s HB 960 makes it a crime to carry a visible handgun in a public library, license or not.
It is a refile of James Talarico’s 2025 bill.
Worst of all, HB 776 makes it a crime to possess a gun within 1,000 feet of school property or inside a school bus without the school’s written authorization.
License to Carry holders get no exception for the surrounding 1,000-foot zone. The only defenses are being at your own home, or keeping the gun stored in your car while you drive through or stop for a legitimate reason.
In much of urban Texas, that turns entire neighborhoods into gun-free sitting duck zones.
New Gun Crimes
Other day-one bills expand gun crimes. Lalani’s HB 609 raises the penalty for criminally negligent firearm access by a child from a Class C to a Class A misdemeanor, even when no one is hurt.
Moody’s HB 658 raises the age covered to 18 and creates a third-degree felony, carrying a lifetime federal gun ban upon conviction, when a child fires a gun and kills or seriously injures someone who does not live with the child.
Rep. Martinez’s HB 103 spreads the reckless-discharge crime to every inch of any county over 500,000 people, including rural private land, and Anchía’s HB 859 makes reckless discharge in a big city a state jail felony.
And constitutional carry is in their sights.
In an October interview with The New Yorker, Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa recounted telling voters she opposed constitutional carry: “What you call constitutional carry, I call permitless carry, and I think people should have a background check to carry a gun.”
She voted against it.
The Senate Is the Last Firewall
Democrats won the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s races, but Republicans held the Texas Senate. Every bill on this list dies there if Senate Republicans refuse to deal.
On election night, state Sen. Charles Schwertner (R-Georgetown) said, “Texas stands as long as the Texas Senate Republican caucus holds the line. We will.”
Gun owners will hold him to it, because a Republican Senate has never been a guarantee. Texas Republicans flirted with red flag gun confiscation in 2018.
In 2023, they passed Sen. Joan Huffman’s SB 728, codifying part of the Biden-Cornyn gun control law by sending juvenile mental health records to the federal background check system. And Texas Gun Rights had to fight Republicans for nearly a decade before Texas became the 21st constitutional carry state.
Universal gun registration, red flag confiscation and gun bans for young adults are exactly where Republicans cave across the country. All three were among the first bills filed in Austin. There is no “common ground” here. A red flag compromise is still confiscation. A “reasonable” background check expansion is still registration.
Democrats promised to lower your bills. They filed gun confiscation instead.
“Democrats promised to lower your bills.”
Did anyone hear any real plans for that? I’m old enough to remember the senile Puppet Administration and the Democrat priority of blowing money while calling it a “Rescue” or “Inflation Reduction.” Bitter, envious people thinking they’re going to get a chunk of money from the “billionaires” are in for a rude awakening. It’s wild how the swing voters can’t remember anything beyond a few months.
They told us the Virginia governor’s race would be the model for winning going forward: avoid “culture war” issues, tell voters what they want to hear, and appear moderate. Then take power and lay down the law.
They said Woke 1.0 was crazy. Did they ever explain which part was crazy? The crazy part was being open about their plans.
“Democrats spent the campaign promising
Texansthe country affordability.”Go listen to Van Jones explain how they did this. It was on a CNN segment. He probably got permission to talk about it first because it would eventually have been exposed, making the whole thing look very underhanded, which it was. They flooded social media with not just bots but tens of thousands of actual people talking about nothing but affordability. They linked the negative to Republicans and the positive to Democrats.
At least Democrats understand how elections work: they’re overwhelmingly driven by emotional appeals.
Everything is bigger in Texas, even the lies the democrats tell.