Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot recently had much to say about guns and gun rights in an interview with The Washington Post’s criminal justice reporter Tom Jackman.
On the topic, Jackman began with, “Let’s talk about guns,” asking Creuzot what he believed needed to be done in the Legislature and in prosecutors’ offices to address mass shootings like the one in Uvalde earlier this year.
“The problem in Texas is … it’s almost a free gun state,” Creuzot responded. “I mean, there are some limitations, but for the most part, if you’re the average citizen, you have the right to carry a gun, buy a gun, whatever.”
“We don’t have much by way of red flag laws,” he continued. “We have a governor and a lieutenant governor and an attorney general who think it’s a good idea to even carry guns in schools.”
Anti-gun advocates claim red flag laws are viable policy solutions to remove guns from the hands of individuals who have allegedly demonstrated dangerous warning signs.
On its website, the national anti-gun group Moms Demand Action frames red flags as a means to “empower family members and/or law enforcement to work with a court to temporarily restrict someone’s access to guns when they are showing strong warning signs that they pose a threat to themselves or others.”
As The Dallas Express reported previously, the red flag laws in Illinois seemingly did nothing to stop Robert Crimo from gaining possession of the firearm he eventually used in the Highland Park Fourth of July parade mass shootings earlier this year, despite the fact that he had a documented history of threats and self-harm.
Charles Lehman, a fellow at the domestic policy-focused Manhattan Institute, studied the effectiveness of red flag laws in preventing killings and concluded that they fell far short of their proponents’ claims.
Lehman found that such laws potentially lowered suicide-by-gun rates but not homicide rates.
“Red flag laws are, in other words, not the solution to gun control’s conundrum that some would have them be,” concluded Lehman.
The district attorney then asserted in the interview that tenured professors have left their positions in Texas because “they were not going to be in a school, or a classroom, with an individual or individuals with a gun.”
National pro-gun group Students for Concealed Carry (SCC) has taken issue with Creuzot’s justification for opposing so-called “campus carry” laws that allow a legally eligible student to possess a firearm while attending class or using facilities.
Refuting common arguments against campus carry laws, such as the one Creuzot used in the interview, SCC argued that “regardless of how any particular student or professor feels about the issue, laws must be based on facts, not feelings. Feeling safe or unsafe is not the same as being safe or unsafe.”
In 2018, a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of a case brought against Texas’ campus carry law by three professors at the University of Texas at Austin.
The professors had argued that having guns in their classrooms would have a “chilling effect” on discourse and thereby limit free speech.
The lower court ruled, and the appeals court upheld, that the professors had not offered any “concrete evidence to substantiate their fears.”
Max Renea Hicks, the attorney who represented the three UT professors in their failed lawsuit, claimed that “virtually any normal person” would support requesting guns be removed from college classrooms.
“We have a Second Amendment right to have a gun in the home. It doesn’t go beyond that,” Hicks asserted.
But Amy Ivey, a Texas Tech University police department member, told local media in an interview two years after the implementation of the campus carry law, “I believe [the policy] makes the campus a safer place.”
Explaining why, Ivey said, “I like to think we’re no longer a targeting opportunity for [active shooters] because they know if they come on campus, there could be the potential for an individual to act to stop the shooting.”
Endorsed by Soros-funded political action committees like “Real Justice,” Creuzot touted that his office aggressively prosecutes gun crimes under current Texas law, including adding enhancements to crimes committed by someone carrying a gun.
“I know that I don’t have the authority to restrict guns … on the other hand, it doesn’t mean we can’t prosecute those cases,” he said.
But Chris McNutt, executive director for Texas Gun Rights, commented to The Dallas Express, “Mr. Creuzot should worry about prosecuting the criminals he is refusing to punish in Dallas County instead of trying to restrict the gun rights of law-abiding Texas worried about protecting themselves from Creuzot’s criminals.”