“It’s just a moral disaster, it’s heartbreaking,” said Dan Golvach of the mass shooting that killed 22 people at a Walmart in the Texan border city of El Paso last Saturday.

But the Texas gun enthusiast does not believe the carnage, which has sparked a political crisis in the US, demands tighter firearms laws.

“We are Texas because of guns,” Golvach, said speaking in an upstairs room at Shiloh, a shooting range and shop in suburban Houston, the conversation punctuated every few seconds by pop-pop-pops as customers fired below.

Guns have played an integral role in Texas’s reality and mythology since it successfully fought for independence from Mexico in 1836. Despite a series of mass murders on top of endless shootings with lower body counts, the state’s conservative lawmakers – and its many gun owners – appear intent on preserving a permissive attitude to weapons, even as they face renewed calls for change.

The state Republican party is closely aligned with the National Rifle Association and has worked to loosen laws with the aim of normalizing the routine carrying of handguns, while also defending the rights of individuals to own the kind of powerful firearms and high-capacity ammunition magazines commonly used in the bloodiest mass shootings.

In fact, Texas tends to react to shootings by loosening gun controls.

Nearly two years after 26 people were shot dead at a church near San Antonio, a law goes into effect next month that will allow licensed gun owners to bring weapons into places of worship.

After eight students and two teachers were shot dead in May last year at Santa Fe high school, near Houston, Texas lawmakers this year passed measures aimed at allowing more armed teachers, improving emergency responses and mental health services at schools.

A series of bills enhancing gun rights in specific situations such as parked vehicles at schools, rental properties and disaster evacuations will take effect next month. In 2016 it became legal for licensed Texans to carry handguns openly in most public places and to carry concealed handguns on university campuses.

“Guns are here. That’s the reality. If criminals want them, they can find a way to get them,” said Golvach.

For him it is personal. His son, Spencer, was shot dead at random by an undocumented immigrant with a long criminal history in Houston in 2015. The 56-year-old musician has a license to carry a handgun and feels it makes him safer.

A supporter for gun rights attends a pro open carry rally outside City Hall, across from the NRA convention in Dallas on 5 May 2018. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

“Taking guns away from law-abiding citizens is a travesty at this point. If you could make it to where there’s no guns on the planet I might listen to you. But there’s a way you’d like it to be and there’s a way it is,” he said.

Shiloh’s store sells a selection of handguns, rifles and accessories. Its walls are decorated with a picture of John Wayne and festooned with stickers and posters with slogans such as “My idea of gun control is using both hands” and “I built my business without the government”.

With the new school year around the corner, the shop also stocks bulletproof backpacks and inserts made by a Houston-based company. “Business always spikes” after a shooting, said the founder and CEO of Tuffypacks, Steve Naremore, by phone. He said he is in favor of a minimum age of 21 and a three-to-five-day waiting period for gun purchases and more thorough background checks.

Still, he added, “If I was a felon I could get a gun in downtown Houston tonight for $500. If someone is hell-bent on acquiring a gun they can get one. It’s not the gun that’s creating these heinous crimes, it’s individuals that have a serious lapse of sanity … [Prevention is] going to be a collaboration between the mental health system, law enforcement and parents and friends that notice [suspicious behavior].”

Texas’s biennial legislature next convenes in 2021 and the Republican governor, Greg Abbott – who in 2015 tweeted that he felt “embarrassed” that Texas was only ranked second among states in new gun purchases – is unlikely to heed Democratic calls for a special session to address gun violence.

The governor gave a speech at the NRA’s 2018 convention in which he said that the root cause of shootings is “not guns, it’s hearts without God”. Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, blamed violent video games and a lack of prayer in schools after last Saturday’s slaughter.

A sign advertising gun sales in Houston, Texas. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Texans have “always been a fiercely independent group of people, we value our rights. I know that for myself and my friends and a lot of folks who come in here, without our gun rights we really don’t have any other rights,” said Jeff Sanford, Shiloh’s 41-year-old general manager. He had a Sig Sauer P320 pistol holstered on his right hip.

“We don’t get a huge run on selling things” after a mass shooting, he said. “What we get more of is people who come in and say: ‘You know what, I’ve seen enough, it’s time for me to learn how to do this.’”

Sanford said that in the first few weeks after 49 people were killed by a gunman at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando in 2016, the range held license-to-carry classes for about 700 members of Houston’s gay community.

“The only way that we can stop violence is to answer with greater violence,” he said. “It’s not something that I like to say. I’m not saying it with a smile on my face.”