Chronicle: Texas residents favor new liberal gun laws

It's been two years since I was last at a church in Texas. Then there was a congregation in Sutherland Springs, where a perpetrator killed 26 members during a worship service.

Now the situation is much more peaceful, but a sense of the massacre is still in the air, inside the church hall where Pastor Reagan Cooksey looks out over the church.

He has no idea how many of the members are armed. He just knows that they are many.

In Florida, more restrictive laws were introduced after the school massacre in Parkland. In New Zealand, semi-automatic rifles were banned after the Christchurch mosque attack. Here, in Texas, people work differently.

On September 1, a dozen new laws were introduced in Texas that all make it easier, not harder, to carry weapons. Among other things, after what happened in Sutherland Springs, it is now easier to have weapons in a church. In the past they had to ask for praise, now it is up to the church if it wants to ban.

Pastor Cooksey doesn't want that.

The congregation is pleased with the new law. Two men show off their guns. One has his in the waistband. The other one is stuffed in the cowboy boot. To stop weapons, more, not fewer, weapons are needed, they mean.

They share that feeling with many Texas residents. After each shooting death, sales increase. At Justin Jobe, at the Texian Firearms in Houston, revenues quadrupled the week after the shooting in El Paso.

Justin Jobe repeats the same phrase as the armed men in the church before him. And the pastor before them. And as people at Sutherland Springs Church said before them:

“Weapons don't kill people. People kill people. "

He says it is the lack of father figures that makes young people act out. That one should not give children spouses anymore. That bullying is not good but that it nevertheless builds character in a child.

In the church he is supported by the armed men, who say that it is the lack of god in school that causes people to lose their moral compass.

In Houston, I meet Abbie Kamin, who works for Houston's mayor in a committee on gun violence. She has presented a five-step plan to stop what she describes as an epidemic of fatalities.

She says people use religion, mental illness, poor upbringing and video games as explanations for all mass shootings, but the problem is that there are too many weapons in the streets. I ask which weapons she wants to remove.

- Semi-automatic rifles should not be on our streets.

Handgun then? I ask.

- No, you should have small arms. People have the right to defend themselves.

Back in the church, Pastor Cooksey shows the basis for what will become the new church of the congregation. He says it will have no windows.

- We made that decision after Sutherland Springs, the perpetrator shot into the church through a window. We do not want to risk the same thing.

In a windowless church, with locked doors and armed parishioners, the services continue.