In the wake of the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn made a risky decision for a Republican anywhere, but especially in Texas.
Moved by the deaths of 19 young school children, Cornyn helped shepherd the nation’s first major legislation on gun safety in decades that sought, among other goals, to enhance background checks for young gun buyers and crack down on illegal gun purchases.
The criticism was immediate.
In short order, the Texas GOP formally rebuked Cornyn, President Donald Trump called him a “RINO,” gun rights groups demanded he apologize for calling party delegates who booed him a “mob” — and the most consequential gun-related legislation the nation has passed in a generation became attached to Cornyn’s legacy.
Now critics are turning up the heat on Cornyn as he faces two primary challengers in what is shaping up to be the fight of his career. They accuse Cornyn of capitulating to Democrats’ gun control demands and turning his back on gun owners — even though the bill largely did not restrict gun owner’s existing rights and was supported by a host of law enforcement groups.
The bill made it easier to remove guns from people threatening to kill themselves or others, as well as people who have committed domestic violence; clarified who needed to register as a federal firearms dealer; and earmarked $11 billion for mental health services and another $2 billion for community-based antiviolence programs.
“This is an issue that divides much of the country, depending on where you live, and maybe divides people living in the same household,” the state’s senior senator said when the bill advanced out of the Senate. “But I think we have found some areas where there’s space for compromise and we’ve also found that there are some red lines and no middle ground.”
Regardless, Second Amendment loyalists, including his two challengers, say Cornyn betrayed them.
“This is not about partisan games — it’s about principle,” said Chris McNutt, the leader of Texas Gun Rights, when he delivered a letter to the White House urging Trump not to endorse Cornyn. “Texas gun owners remember who wrote the blueprint for Biden’s gun control agenda, and we won’t stand idly by while the architect asks for our vote.”
The issue gets at the “heart of what the liability is overall for Cornyn” — he’s a long-serving senator who has grown into his role by being able to work legislation, said Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin.
“It gets at the concern that some of the most conservative voters have about Cornyn, which is that he’s too much a creature of the institution,” Blank said. “He’s too willing to compromise.”
In his campaign, Cornyn has aimed to focus on the mental health and schools funding in the legacy legislation, while stressing his own career bonafides fighting gun control. “The bill hardened schools to protect our children and invested the most money in American history for mental health services,” Cornyn campaign senior adviser Matt Mackowiak said in an email. “Sen. Cornyn has consistently received an A+ rating from the NRA and the National Sports Shooting Association, and he has been a strong supporter of the Second Amendment his entire career which will not change.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton has repeatedly blasted Cornyn as an “anti-gun establishment politician” for working with Democrats to get the bipartisan package to the desk of former President Joe Biden, who swiftly signed it into law.
Similarly U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston has alleged Cornyn “sold Texans out.”
“There’s no rewriting Sen. Cornyn’s record on the Second Amendment,” Hunt’s campaign said in a statement. “You can’t strip the rights of law-abiding citizens and call it ‘progress.’ Texans know better. And you don’t have to take my word for it, just look at President Trump’s reaction to Cornyn’s hallmark gun-control deal.”
Trump at the time of Senate negotiations said the proposed legislation “will go down in history as the first step in the movement to TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY.” He warned, “Republicans, be careful what you wish for!!!”
The president, whose endorsements have grown ever more influential, has yet to lend his formal backing to any of the three Republicans running for senate. He is close with all three and has repeatedly skirted making an endorsement. But there is no evidence there’s any lingering animosity between Trump and Cornyn.
While it was a risk for Cornyn to be the main negotiator, in a lot of ways he was the most-qualified candidate for the job. He had the then-leader’s confidence and ability to get members of his own party on board, carried by the respect he received as a former Senate majority whip. He’s also stood in the way of some Democratic-backed gun proposals in the past, while cautiously embracing ideas he thought could solve a problem — all while holding onto a top rating from the National Rifle Association.
One of those instances occurred in 2018, following another mass shooting in Texas, when he helped pass legislation to strengthen the national background check system for gun purchases and called the accomplishment “near the top, if not the top” of his Senate achievements.
Although the 2018 bill opens another line of criticism, Cornyn has said that it could help prevent another shooting like the one in Sutherland Springs, where a gunman killed 26 people and wounded 22 others at a church.
Texas GOP primary voters have consistently ranked gun rights as a top issue, and the state Legislature has repeatedly expanded access to guns — even as the state experienced a spate of mass shootings like the one in Uvalde that inspired Cornyn to collaborate with Democrats.
In that shooting, a teenage gunman in 2022 used a semiautomatic rifle he purchased legally days after turning 18 years old. Investigations into the shooting later revealed he had asked adults in his life to buy him one before he could, to no avail. Cornyn’s gun bill would not have prevented that shooter from buying a firearm.
Still, the bill had fans in some law enforcement officials and prosecutors who praised one of its key components. The law created the first federal violations specifically for unlawful trafficking and straw purchasing of firearms, or buying guns on behalf of someone who cannot.
Federal prosecutors for years have tried to dam the iron river of firepower flowing from Texas cities into Mexico, where guns are largely illegal but drug cartels have amassed armories of powerful guns sold in America. But prosecutors had few laws with which to prosecute offenders.
In the last three years, the straw purchasing statutes have been used to thwart a number of big gun buys, including hundreds of semiautomatic rifles like the one used by the Uvalde gunman and .50 caliber rifles, whose armor-piercing ammunitions were once used by a cartel to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter.
In the first year of the new laws being in effect alone, The U.S. Department of Justice charged 140 people for violating the statutes.
