Houston Chief of Police Art Acevedo warned Sunday that “inaction of elected officials” against gun violence means there will be more school shootings like the one that killed nine students and a teacher last week in Santa Fe, Texas.

Two days after his Facebook post that he had “hit rock bottom” with respect to gun-rights supporters who claim that “guns aren’t the problem and there’s little we can do” went viral, Acevedo urged Americans to take action at the ballot box.

“People at the state level and the federal level in too many places in our country are not doing anything other than offering prayers,” Acevedo said on Sunday’s Face the Nation program.

The “vast majority” of gun owners in the United States “are pragmatic and actually support gun sense and gun reform in terms of keeping guns in the right hands,” Acevedo said.


“We need to start using the ballot box and ballot initiatives to take the matters out of the hands of people that are doing nothing that are elected into the hands of the people to see that the will of the people in this country is actually carried out.”

Asked what specific laws could have prevented the Santa Fe shooting, where the shooter apparently used guns legally obtained by his father and no semi-automatic rifle was used, Acevedo urged tougher criminal liability for those who do not adequately secure their firearms.

A Texas law on “criminal negligence” making it illegal for a minor to access a firearm without supervision only applies if the child is “younger than 17 years of age.” The confessed shooter in Santa Fe this past week was 17 years old, rendering that law inapplicable in this case.