After months of pleading for more gun control measures, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children died in a mass shooting, was told by the Republican leader of the State Senate to stop bringing up gun legislation or be barred from speaking at all.

In the State House, Republican members talked and joked among themselves as another Democrat, Representative Jarvis Johnson of Houston, rose to discuss gun control. “This is not a joke — this is real,” he shouted from the lectern at his colleagues on Friday. “Children every day are dying.”

It was only hours later that gunfire again ripped apart the daily life of people in Texas. This time the violence erupted at a popular shopping centre in the Dallas suburb of Allen, where a 33-year-old gunman armed with what officials said was an AR-15-style rifle swiftly killed eight people and wounded at least seven others, including at least one child, before a police officer fatally shot him on Saturday.

The killings came just over a week after a mass shooting in rural San Jacinto County, north of Houston, where five people living together were killed by a neighbour after they asked him to stop shooting his gun in his front yard. And they occurred a little less than a year after the massacre at Uvalde.

Among some Texans, the drumbeat of mass murder has fueled rising frustration and a slight openness to more gun regulation in a state where even Democrats proudly discuss their firearms. But the violence has done little to reshape the political realities in the State Capitol, where Republicans control both legislative chambers.

In the past two years, as the state has been shaken by more than a dozen mass killings of four or more people, Texas has increased access to firearms, doing away with its permit requirements to carry handguns and lowering the age when adults can carry handguns to 18 from 21.