Open carry of handguns in Texas: fear for some but ‘everybody else is packing’
Tom Dart
Guardian.com
Friday 1 January 2016
As a gun owner, Angela Turner is not anti-firearms. She simply does not want to take her three young children out for a meal and feel like the family has stepped into a wild west saloon.
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Despite its reputation as the heart of gun-toting cowboy culture, compared with most states Texas’s gun laws have always been relatively restrained. Until now: as of Friday, the Lone Star State is the most populous state in the country, and Houston and Dallas the largest cities, to allow the visible carrying of handguns.
That means that licensed Texans will be able to stroll with holstered pistols in most public places and supportive businesses, from hardware stores to diners to churches.
“It’s not about taking away people’s second amendment rights,” said Turner, of the Texas chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, of her opposition to the law.
“It’s about whether when I’m taking my children to a restaurant, if I’m having to assess whether a gentleman who walks into a restaurant with a gun on his hip is using it for his own personal safety, whether he intends to hold up the restaurant, or whether he might lose his temper later on.”
Once the initial surprise at seeing more guns in public has faded, and it becomes unremarkable to walk past someone with a Smith and Wesson picking up a milk carton in a San Antonio supermarket, Turner is worried that her children will grow up in an environment where displaying firearms is considered a routine aspect of daily life.
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