Texas Never Had a Red Flag Law. This Bill Makes Sure One Can’t Sneak In.

A court order that takes someone’s guns without a criminal charge, based on a prediction about future danger. Texas has never had that law. SB1362 makes sure it stays that way, no matter which government tries to bring it in the back door.

Signed June 22, 2025, effective September 1, 2025, SB1362 passed the Senate 19-11 and, after a House amendment, the Senate concurred 20-11 while the House passed it 86-53.

No local government in Texas can adopt its own version of a red-flag ordinance. No Texas entity, state or local, can accept federal grant money tied to implementing one. And the bill declares that any federal effort to enforce an extreme risk protective order in Texas is against state public policy. Anyone who tries to serve or enforce one here, unless it’s an order actually issued under Texas’s own law, commits a state jail felony.

Every existing Texas protective order stays exactly where it was. Domestic violence protective orders issued under the Family Code or Code of Criminal Procedure are explicitly exempted. Families dealing with real domestic violence keep full access to Texas’s existing, judicially supervised protective-order system. This bill targets one specific mechanism: removing guns based on perceived risk without an underlying criminal charge. It leaves everything else alone.

The provision declaring federal ERPO enforcement “unenforceable” in Texas is stronger political language than a state can fully back up under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, if a real federal red-flag law existed and federal officers tried to enforce it directly. In practice, this functions as a states’-rights refusal to cooperate, which Texas can lawfully do, rather than a mechanism that would block direct federal enforcement outright if it ever came to that. No federal ERPO law exists today, so this is a firewall against a hypothetical, not a fight already underway.

A clean Second Amendment protection that forecloses a due-process-light firearm-removal mechanism while keeping Texas’s real domestic-violence protections fully intact, backed by a genuine felony penalty. Support it.

This is our read of the bill. We encourage you to read it yourself and reach your own conclusions.