I do appreciate your reply, rpyne, and I admire what y'all achieved in Utah.
"Texas," as the tourism slogan says, "is like a whole other country."
Utah is vastly unpopulated and mostly owned by the Federal government. There is the collection of cities in the north-central part of the state, then St. George in the southwest, and Vernal in the northeast, and a couple of others in the 10,000 or under population range.
Texas has almost no federal land except for military bases, is populated even in the "unpopulated" portions, and has four major metropolitan areas (three of them in the top 25 largest in the country, and El Paso at #65). Texas has almost 10 times the population of Utah.
Utah has a marked difference between their urban centers and the desert dwellers, but the latter don't have a significant political presence in the state. Whatever goes in SLC and Ogden, pretty much goes for the whole state. In Texas, though, DFW, Houston, El Paso, San Antonio, and Austin all have markedly different cultures. And those are just the major metro areas - unlike Utah, small towns in Texas make up a good chunk of the population, and representation in the state legislature. Things in Waco and Wichita Falls are very different from Texarkana and Tyler. Lubbock is not Laredo; Midland is not Alpine. Even on the coast, Corpus Christi is not Galveston.
I'm not dissing Utah; I love the state, and would love to visit. It's just not Texas, and the geo-political challenges are very different.
In Texas, political decisions are made by consensus, and the consensus relies on established political machines. The TSRA is one of those machines, and legislators hesitate to listen to anyone else when it comes to gun issues.
Seriously, we could put together a coalition just as big as TSRA, and still be ignored. We could even take over TSRA and be ignored, because the political power brokers would still talk to the same individuals they talked to before.