Texas governors love to call special sessions.

It’s a love that’s easy to understand.

After spending five months as a frustrated spectator while the Legislature wrangles and haggles, the governor has the power, with the stroke of a pen, to force 181 lawmakers to work overtime in a confined space and cancel their summer vacation plans. Kind of intoxicating, in a perverse sort of way.

In 2003, Rick Perry called three special sessions to allow his fellow Republicans to throw out the results of a 2001 redistricting process and approve new, GOP-friendly maps.

In 2011, Perry’s special session agenda included legislation preventing airport pat-downs by Transportation Security Administration officers.

In 2013, Perry called three more special sessions, the first two dominated by rancor over a Republican-led push to restrict abortion access.

Two years ago, Greg Abbott offered a laundry list of 20 agenda items for his first special session, including a widely reviled bathroom bill designed to force transgender individuals to use public restrooms that conform to their biological sex, rather than their gender identity.

Special sessions are supposed to deal with emergencies, to address problems that can’t wait a year-and-a-half until the Legislature convenes again. But recent history suggests that Texas governors are just as likely to use them for wedge-issue pandering as for real emergencies.

This year, we’re facing a genuine crisis on the issue of gun violence. A month ago, 22 people were murdered at an El Paso Walmart by a white nationalist who drove 650 miles across the state for the sole purpose of extinguishing as many Mexican American lives as his AK-47 assault weapon would allow.

Last weekend, a drive-by shooting rampage killed seven people in Odessa and Midland and left 25 injured.

That brings us to five major mass shootings in this state over the past three years.

On ExpressNews.com: Abbott moves to strengthen ‘suspicious activity’ reporting

In light of these developments, 63 of the 66 members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus lent their names this week to a request that Abbott call a special session to combat gun violence. So far, the governor has resisted, preferring to let interim House and Senate committees — formed this week by House Speaker Dennis Bonnen and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — confer and gradually arrive at a consensus.

It’s an approach that paid some dividends on the issue of education. In 2017, Abbott formed the Texas Commission on Public School Finance and the commission’s long hours of deliberation led to a bipartisan breakthrough on public-education funding during this year’s legislative session.

On Wednesday, Abbott also issued eight executive orders, primarily designed to improve coordination between various agencies on suspicious-activity reports.

Nonetheless, it’s frustrating to hear Abbott warn against “hastily” crafted gun-control measures that would result from a special session. After all, this is the same governor who didn’t hesitate to use the special-session process to target transgender individuals and subject them to the threat of verbal and physical abuse, all for the cause of solving a non-existent problem.

Our state — and national — history on firearms issues is familiar and infuriating. We react with shock and outrage to a mass shooting and display a sense of urgency that quickly hardens into a collective complacency.

That’s why a special session is needed. Because time and distance are the enemies of any drive to reform our gun laws.

Even the urgency of a special session would collide with a couple of major obstacles: this state’s powerful gun culture and the belief — long perpetuated by the National Rifle Association — that even the smallest concession on gun rights will set us on a path to totalitarianism.

Conservatives didn’t always accept this slippery-slope theory so easily. Ronald Reagan — the patron saint of the modern conservative movement — opposed the sale of assault weapons and lent his support in the early 1990s to the Brady Bill, a piece of legislation which required a seven-day waiting period on handgun sales.

One of the proposals being offered by Texas House Democrats is a red flag law, which allows police or family members to petition a court to temporarily disarm someone considered a danger to themselves or someone else.

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You’ll find a good argument for red flag laws in the story of Ralph Pulliam, a gun-wielding immigration vigilante who has sent 14 email complaints to the Texas Attorney General’s Office over the past two years alleging sanctuary city violations.

“We will open fire on these thugs,” Pulliam wrote about undocumented immigrants, according to an Express-News article by Brian Chasnoff. “It will be a bloodbath.”

In this state, we’ve got open carry. We’ve got campus carry. We’ve got no restrictions on magazine capacity or assault weapons. And the problem keeps getting worse. Try as we might in this state, we can’t arm our way out of this crisis.

@gilgamesh470

Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470