The 2025 legislative session brought a major victory in Texas for Second Amendment supporters.
On May 28, 2025, Texas lawmakers passed H.B. 3053, a bill that bans local governments from organizing or participating in firearm buyback programs. This new law takes effect on September 1, 2025, in Texas, and it’s a powerful message to anti-gun activists and overreaching city councils across the country: you can’t quietly dismantle the Second Amendment with backdoor policies.
H.B. 3053 prohibits cities and counties from launching or enforcing any programs that:
- Attempt to remove firearms from circulation,
- Aim to reduce civilian gun ownership, or
- Let people turn in firearms anonymously without accountability.
That means no more taxpayer-funded efforts to collect guns under the pretense of “public safety.” No more soft disarmament campaigns that treat our constitutional rights as a problem to be solved.
Firearm buyback programs are a feel-good façade. They don’t take guns away from criminals. They don’t stop violence. But what they do is chip away at your freedom—one surrendered right at a time.
This law ensures that local politicians can’t skirt around state and federal protections to create their own anti-gun policies. It reaffirms that in Texas, the right to keep and bear arms isn’t up for negotiation—and it’s not for sale. The government cannot “buy back” something it never owned in the first place.
Gun buy-back programs rarely result in the collection of firearms used in crimes. Instead, they collect old hunting rifles, broken handguns, and inherited firearms people were never going to use in the first place. It’s all for show—a PR stunt to make it look like something is being done, while chipping away at civilian gun ownership behind the scenes. Local-level buyback programs tend to operate under the radar, far from public scrutiny. Without them, local officials lose a major tool for pushing their anti-2A agenda at the city and county level.
This is a great step forward in protecting the Second Amendment rights of Texans and it’s an important reminder that only when concerned citizens are engaged in the government process are we able to pass laws that protect our Constitutional rights.
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