On Saturday, May 11th, my wife and I were at the new George W. Bush library at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. We had just gotten through security and were standing in the vast marble atrium, waiting for some friends, when suddenly a cry went out: “Active shooter!” Everybody dove for cover—but there was none. We were lined up against the walls, feeling very exposed. An elderly man had fallen and was lying on his back, helpless. People were crying and praying. The library went into lockdown. Two university policemen with automatic weapons and grim expressions shoved ammunition clips into their chambers and walked toward the front entrance. It was less than a month after the Boston Marathon bombing, and even though it seemed implausible that such a pleasant afternoon could be interrupted by a terrorist attack, I had to admit that the target would seem an obvious one if I’d just heard about it on the radio.

I could see through the front windows a security officer guiding a boy, who looked to be about ten years old, toward the building—to safety, I supposed.

Moments later, an officer said, “All clear!” People stood and looked around, shaken. Many were bruised from hitting the floor. The old man who was lying on his back had to be helped to his feet. He had a nasty cut on his elbow.

Later, a library spokesman revealed to the Dallas Morning News that a man sitting outside the building had been holding a toy gun. (See my friend Stephen Harrigan—s post on the same event.)

This was a non-story, in other words, a false alarm, and yet, for a brief period, everyone in that atrium must have felt a dreadful kinship with all the victims of the mass shootings that continually plague our country. But I also thought about the gun laws in the state of Texas. This very month, the Texas House of Representatives passed twelve bills in a single day designed to soften gun laws, although Texas is already among the most permissive states in the Union when it comes to firearms. One of the laws allows college students to carry handguns to class. There is no waiting period to purchase a weapon, or any need to register a firearm. Machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers are perfectly legal. Indeed, one bill now under consideration exempts assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from federal regulation in Texas. If that provision is ruled to be unconstitutional, another bill now in the Senate would make it a crime for any law-enforcement office in Texas to carry out federal rules restricting gun rights.

All of this gets back to the man with the toy gun. It occurred to me that he might be the father of the boy I saw being hustled away by the security officer. Of course, it’s one thing to see a boy playing with pretend guns on the lawn and another to see a grown man holding what looks like a real one outside a possible terrorist target.

(Later, the Dallas Observer carried a story saying that the man with the toy gun was smoking outside while his son left to go to the bathroom. His wife was crouching on the floor of the atrium with the rest of us. They had just purchased the toy gun earlier that day at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. The husband was handcuffed and questioned for two hours. The mother described the gun as “a toy six-shooter with a bright orange tip.” Police offered to mail the toy to the parents, but they were told simply to destroy it.)

With Texas legislators so eager to extend the freedom of the state’s citizens to be armed at all times, one wonders what they expect when people with real guns appear in public places. At S.M.U., students are not allowed to have guns on campus. Suppose the incident had happened at the other Bush library, the one for George H. W. Bush at Texas A&M, where it’s legal to display weapons openly unless they are used in a manner that “harms, threatens or causes fear to others.” As we learned that afternoon at S.M.U., the mere presence of a gun openly displayed causes fear and confusion.

I thought about an incident that took place in Killeen, Texas, more than twenty years ago. An unemployed seaman named George Hennard drove his pickup truck through the plate-glass window of a Luby’s Cafeteria, then stalked the diners down and fired his gun at them one by one. He shot more than fifty people; twenty-three died. I can easily imagine how vulnerable and exposed they felt. There was no place to run. When the police finally arrived, Hennard fatally shot himself.

Suzanna Gratia Hupp survived the massacre by jumping through a window, but both her parents were killed. Just before entering the restaurant, she had taken her gun out of her purse and locked it in her car; at the time, it was illegal to carry concealed weapons, even in Texas. This was an era that has almost disappeared from memory—a time when citizens could freely walk through public spaces without going through metal detectors, when office buildings rarely required photographs and visitor passes, when you could pick up a friend at the gate when his plane arrived, when security cameras were a rarity, and when the notion that people needed to be armed to protect themselves in public—or in classrooms—was thought to be a crackpot throwback to the Old West. After the tragedy in Killeen, Hupp was elected to the Texas House of Representatives and helped push a law through the legislature permitting Texans to carry concealed weapons. She said that if she had had the gun in her purse, she might have saved lives. Governor George W. Bush signed the bill into law in 1996. (Hupp retired from the legislature in 2006.)

There is a painful logic to Hupp’s argument, which she has made in speeches all over the country. The more guns there are, the more citizens will want to arm themselves to protect against the crazies and the terrorists who may break into our lives on any beautiful spring afternoon. This logic has led the Texas legislature to continually facilitate the sale of weapons that make such terrifying events more likely to happen. I have no illusion that Texas is going to restrict gun ownership anytime soon. But in the future that the gun lobby is creating—not just in Texas—many more of us will likely be diving for cover.

Illustration by Jon Han.