Texans can carry handguns without a license or training starting Sept. 1 | Hacker News Reader

Texans can carry handguns without a license or training starting Sept. 1

texastribune.org

54 pointsblacktulip75 comments

This helps eliminate a victimless crime. The criminals will still carry illegally and this bill actually upgrades the felony for those who are caught carrying who legally could not.

Now someone who needs to carry who can't afford the overpriced classes, fingerprints, waiting for the state to mail you a card to give you your rights is gone. A lot of poor people need to carry a gun for protection, and either cant afford the other hurdles, or just can't make time to jump through all the hoops.

Remember, we're not the first state to allow this, not even the top 10, permits continued to go UP in states that passed these laws, and crime did not go up.

"A lot of poor people need to carry a gun for protection"

How utterly dystopian.

It's true though and has always been the case. Working odd hours not the usual 8-5, might not have a car so walking to work sometimes at night, living in heavy crime areas because it's affordable. I'm not projecting, just calling it like it is and why this bill is a good thing in the eyes of the people who don't even consider this sane.

A gun wants to be used. Let's let it simmer a few more decades and see what happens.

Ok Vermont has had it for decades. You can be 16 years old and carry in that state. Resident and non-resident. Wait and see has passed.

Vermont's largest city has a whopping 42k inhabitants - at this scale it isn't surprising that this has no noticeable negative effects.

" Don't carry a gun if you're not ready to draw it, don't draw a gun if you're not ready to shoot. "

-Every gun instructor ever.

The issue is if someone wnat to jump on you and you have a gun, especially with no training, you'll be more dangerous to yourself than anyone wanting your wallet. I got robbed three time, because i was in the situation you describe (no money so have to live in high crime area, no car, and odd hours coz i had to finance my studies). I resisted one time, the first one. Trip to the hospital, police station, wasted a day for nothing after the robbery.

The two others i was polite, gave them my money ( rarely have more than 20 on me) and they let me keep my credit cards, ID and my phone (my shitty firefox OS did not impress them). I wouldn't be able to shoot at someone, so a gun on me is lost, and i think especially in a high crime area, walking with a gun would be a bad idea (and i know how to use one)

And i hope you have good armorers in TX with this law, because is someone want to buy a SW500 or the new tech S&W (don't have the name) and never used a gun before, they might kill their aggressor, but most likely not touch them, loose a hand in the process.

I mean, the Second Amendment doesn't come with restrictions, requirements or qualifiers, and American gun culture is the reason owning a gun is seen as an unrestricted, inalienable right, and not a responsibility.

This is what the people of Texas want, let them get it good and hard, I say.

I mean, the Second Amendment doesn't come with restrictions, requirements or qualifiers

I mean... it does. It's right there, in the first dozen words.

It's confusingly written, and the Supreme Court has decided it doesn't mean anything at all. But it seems weird to pretend that it just doesn't exist.

It's so bleak that people think the solution to violent lawlessness is more guns, more violence.

Now in the hands of untrained civilians. Normally you could say their unadulterated freedom allows them to commit accidents, but that's hard to swallow when you've just said the poor are desperate and without sufficient support from law enforcement. That's not freedom.

What’s wrong with giving people options?

Um. Yes. Giving people more options to live their lives as they see fit, rather than forcing them to rely on the benevolence of a government, is indeed freedom. By definition. Please don't post in bad faith.

People living in places where they feel they need a gun, can't afford the lessons aren't empowered by this, they're a hostage to poverty and undercontrolled crime. Any rational person of means would move away. All they can do is pick up a gun and hope it isn't stolen and used on them.

Law enforcement isn't governmental benevolence, it's the foundation of society that stops people violently taking everything you have. Life without fear gives people options. Fund effective policing and social programmes (which directly and demonstrably improve L&O outcomes), education, get [all] guns off the streets.

The supreme court has decided that the police have no obligation to interrupt a crime or protect you from violence, only to investigate afterwards. Even if they decide to, they're minutes or sometimes hours away.

> The supreme court has decided

We shouldn't give up on progress because of how five judges read a bit of old parchment. I'm talking about societal aims, and of course, they're just my opinion.

We should want to decrease crime, not just shoot at it. That's not just education, drug rehab, it's a solid police presence and community engagement. A world where the top earning 10% still interact with the bottom earning 10%. We keep moving in the wrong direction.

Castle Rock was 7-2 and indeed was unanimous on the question at issue as a federal matter.

From Justice Stevens' dissent: "It is perfectly clear, on the one hand, that neither the Federal Constitution itself, nor any federal statute, granted respondent or her children any individual entitlement to police protection."

The basis for the dissent was that Justices Stevens and Ginsburg believed, out of deference to federalism, that the Supreme Court should not have ruled on the issue of whether state law provided for such a right, but instead should have deferred to the federal district court or certified the question to the state Supreme Court.

Moreover, the Constitution is emphatically not "a bit of old parchment." For shame.

You ignored what I said.

Tomorrow's progress isn't dependent the Constitution. What we want for our future does not rely on the permissions of what came before it.

What you said was "We shouldn't give up on progress because of how five judges read a bit of old parchment"

It isn't five judges. It isn't a bit of old parchment. Your dishonesty is unbecoming.

But why not make the classes state-provided and cheap?

> "Now someone who needs to carry who can't afford the overpriced classes, fingerprints, waiting for the state to mail you a card to give you your rights is gone. A lot of poor people need to carry a gun for protection, and either cant afford the other hurdles, or just can't make time to jump through all the hoops."

The same could be said for voting. Interesting that Texas went the exact opposite direction in that regard.

I thought this was a terrible idea until I realized that other states are already doing it without any problems.

No problems? Look at the science. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14906 "In a hypothetical situation in which there are 39,000 firearms deaths nationally under the permissive combination of these three laws, we expect 4,475 (80% CI, 1,761 to 6,949) more deaths nationally than under the restrictive combination of these laws."

As usual the "science" on this issue is garbage politics. Gun violence by legal gun owners is statistically near zero despite owning hundreds of millions of guns in the US.

But our state government is bought and paid for by church and guns. The governor shamed us for buying fewer guns than California:

https://www.statesman.com/news/20171106/in-15-greg-abbott-em...

We're trying to get more guns in more hands and we've lowered the bar. This isn't about rights. Abbot seems to generally want to kill us, by any means necessary.

This is an interesting chance to support or refute the theory you cite. Watch the homicide rate in TX over the next five years and see if it goes up 11% (maybe after adjusting for national/regional chnages) or not.

For a study like this, I would expect some connection between the mechanisms and the results. For instance, if carrying laws are changed, is there an associated change in the types of deaths that could plausibly be attributed to that (i.e. lawful carriers shooting people)?

Genuine question: can you elaborate on "without any problems"? As a European I find the level of gun violence in the US to be shocking, so I don't understand why lax gun laws like these are not a problem. The Bill Hicks quote "There's no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone, and if you make one you're a fool and a communist" is perhaps overly simplistic but it does feel like it gets at a truth that when you have lots of people walking around with guns, lots of people are going to get shot. I recognise that how the US gets to low gun ownership from where it is now, and whether the US even wants that, are tricky questions, but I really have trouble wrapping my head around the view on gun ownership in the US in general, let alone particular aspects of it like private ownership of assault weapons.

States that have passed these laws saw no dramatic increase in shootings, and optional permits actually went up in these states. Everything related to buying, owning, shooting a gun is exactly the same, the only difference is you no longer need to pay $50-400 to carry it on your person, which criminals do for free.

Ah, OK, so "no problem" in the sense that it hasn't made things any worse. Fair enough.

If anything it has made it better, which I'm sure a lot of people will roll their eyes at, but people are much less likely to start anything if they know most people are carrying. I know the media skews your views on america, but it's not like the movies, we're not over here root'n toot'n with our guns out like it's the wild west. I have lived in Texas for 10 years and have seen 1 or 2 guns in holsters. Every other one is concealed. I have never heard a gun shot other than a gun range, and have never witnessed anyone pull a gun or shoot one at someone. The only guns I've seen pulled are those of the police, pistols and rifles.

Yeah, having visited a few times I get that the media portrayal of the US being a 21st century Western is off. And I sort of get the idea that "people are much less likely to start anything if they know most people are carrying". But there's a tacit assumption in there that criminals have guns. For all that legal owners may not be a problem in the vast majority of cases, the more firearms there are, the bigger the pool of firearms there are for criminals to get their hands on. Having read through a few of these responses it seems to boil down to how much US citizens trust their government compared to other countries. The fact that there are federal bodies - such as the army - with enough firepower to flatten a city, yet people insist on carrying guns because they don't trust the government feels a bit off. But I think I'm straying from your point there.

I don't want to go further down a tangent here, but you also see how little Americans trust their government in the number of people reluctant to get vaccinated and the number of people who seriously believe the election was stolen. Both of those examples are mostly right leaning people. But this is also the same group that's most interested in gun rights. Is there similar distrust for the government on the left, if so how does it present? What irrational behaviours do democrats have because they distrust their government - or is distrust of the government mostly focused in the right of the political spectrum?

Wanting to defund the police? Having this opinion and at the same time wanting to ban guns is truly puzzling.

Good example! So mistrust of the government is probably universal in the US and just presents differently on the left and the right.

> Having this opinion and at the same time wanting to ban guns is truly puzzling.

It's irrational, don't try to apply logic to it. It's a simplistic emotional response.

That's my view.

Ask Vietnam or Afghanistan if you can fight off the American military with rifles.

My view as an American:

I trust my sketchy neighbor with a gun much more than I trust the government with a gun.

But your government does have guns, don't they?

There is very little gun violence in the US. What you're seeing is a media problem.

But if you look here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... - the USA has a very high per-capita gun homicide rate (4.46) compared to most other comparable countries (e.g. the G7 countries which are 0.2, 0.52, 2.33, 1.04, 1.13 and 0.02). Interesting that France (2.33) is so high - I hadn't realised that.

The vast majority (practically all) gun homicides happen in a handful of counties where guns are completely banned and are gang members killing gang members.

That's a cultural and economic problem that isn't solved by gun laws.

> As a European I find the level of gun violence in the US to be shocking

this is probably a perception problem. the uk doesnt have guns but has much higher violent crime with knives. in some ways, stabbing is much more violent and interpersonally malicious than pulling a trigger. there is a very close prevalence of violent crime per capita in US and UK, its just that stab wounds are easier to trest than gunshots.

the US has above average gun violence per capita, but acting like its some widespread danger is largely a construction of fear-driven media and sensationalism. most of US gun violence numbers come from highly localized pockets like detroit, LA, and chicago. its not a problem in almost all of America.

It's more of a problem where more Americans live, is what you're saying.

Fair point in some ways - perhaps knife crime is higher here. But on balance it's surely better to have violent crime that's more likely to involve treatable outcomes rather than death?

You will also find knife-crime in Europe (especially the UK) is just as concentrated, if not more, to a few inner-city neighbourhoods.

As a practical reality, the vast majority of Americans never see gun violence their entire lives, it isn't part of their lived experience. They view guns as a tool, not a significant risk. Almost all of the gun violence is concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods with long histories of violent crime generally where, ironically, gun possession is often illegal.

Technically speaking, Americans can legally own almost any weapon they can safely store. There are even a few ballistic missiles floating around the US in private hands.

This article is specifically about lawful carrying, not ownership. Criminals generally don't care whether carrying is lawful or not, so you wouldn't expect this particular law to matter a lot.

There just aren't a lot of cases where someone without any criminal intent carrying a gun all of a sudden gets mad and starts shooting people over an insult or something.

You are kind of right that the sheer volume of guns in the US, more than one per person (even if you count babies), could contribute to the homicide rate by making it easier for prohibited owners to still acquire a gun. But even that is complicated and has a lot of nuance.

The murders are very localized here to areas which throw off the average, and are much more strongly associated with factors other than guns. If you aren't in one of those areas, the murder rate is much lower.

In my opinion, guns are mostly fine most places in the US. But the general availability of guns does enable volent areas to be more violent based on specific local problems.

www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/26/gda-texas-mass-shootings-rise-in-2020-data-reports/115506570/

Were they criminals before they shot everyone?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/two-women-shot-in-secon...

I haven't heard that any of the suspects in the two events on 6th street were carrying illegally or were already criminals (they could have been).

We seem killing more people here in TX already. Letting more drunks have the right to carry and conceal isn't gonna make things better. Maybe it won't make things worse either but it's already pretty bad.

Sincerely, Getting the F Out Of TX, ASAP

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

California and Texas have similar homicide rates: 4.3 vs 4.9. Both numbers are low in the sense that homicide isn't something you should be afraid of in either state, unless you are in a specifically risky place or situation.

And regarding your anecdotes, it's doubtful to me that a law would prevent many of those people from carrying a gun. Maybe some, but nothing that would show much signal in aggregate data.

That's where the similarities end though.

CA has a much poorer population at the bottom end, the price of living is 70% higher, multiple-point higher unemployment, less space, lower education outcomes, etc, etc, etc.

CA's problems are not TX's problems.

The facts you posted are interesting; thank you.

But I don't follow your point. Why would the parent "Get the F Out" of Texas if the murder rate is both low and comparable to the most obvious alternative?

Okay, maybe I didn't get your point. You introduced CA into this, but igetspam didn't say GTFOTX-and-go-to-CA. I see that you're using it because lots of people do look at the two states as two options for setting up shop.

I guess I was really pointing out that parts of CA has much bigger problems that make it ill-advised to compare state-for-state. Maybe that's unfair but they're both pretty colossal states.

And there are other options. Portland, Seattle, etc.

I should have put it as "Texas is in the middle of the pack in the US". But there are at least a couple ways that could be challenged as well: (a) middle of a list of states is not the same as having equal populations above and below; (b) it raises the question of whether the U.S. murder rate is a reasonable benchmark.

On HN, really anything is subject to some kind of challenge.

I like comparing the two states because they are both big (and therefore not as subject to cherry-picking) and have fairly different governing philosophies.

At the end of the day, you don't choose a state based on minimizing your chances of lightning strikes. You stop climbing trees in the middle of a thunderstorm and you forget about it.

Maybe you'd choose specific cities or areas, but state is kind of ridiculous.

Congratulations to Texas for joining the more than 20 states respecting both the natural right to arms and the Constitution's regulation on government interference with it.

I wish they had enumerated many more specific rights not to infringe, but some of the most violated today were considered too obvious to merit specific attention.

We're seeing a huge surge for protecting gun rights on the local and state levels, nationally.

Yeah, it's the same wave of people pushing "contraversal" voting laws at that level. Really something to be proud of /s

Absolutely incorrect. Gun control is another racist policy meant to keep control over those the elites fear.

So is restricting voting

I'm curious to know which additional rights you want to be granted.

Well the Bill of Rights doesn't grant rights. It's a list of things the government can't do. I would start with stopping them from restricting property at all. Much less guns. Behavior should be regulated, not inanimate objects.

This is part of a larger trend. See the maps here of the changes in permitted carry since the 80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry

This GIF in particular makes that point clearly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#/media/Fi...

And if anything it has accelerated around the Covid pandemic:

https://biostats.ucdavis.edu/health-news/newsroom/us-saw-sur...

As the politics in this country have curved in a liberal direction, I'm quite surprised that gun control issues seem to have moved the other way. What can explain that?

People on both sides like to have options to protect themselves and family. So many new liberal gun owners these past few years with the pandemic, civil unrest, liberal president calling for bans and restrictions on everything. Conservatives welcoming new gun owners with open arms. I have heard from so many friends talking about their liberal friends asking what guns to buy.

Perhaps it's the same trend. Citizens having control over arms is a classical liberal idea.

It should be pointed out that some other States have always operated this way with no discernible impact. The permitting process in most States is almost entirely pro forma -- if you can legally own a firearm then there generally isn't cause to deny a permit. In terms of increasing safety, permitting is largely a no-op.

I’m curious about what parents from other states think of when considering moving to Texas. The priorities of the State Government seem to be mis aligned with the actual problems facing its people. This law in particular arguably both makes the state less safe and encourages a gun owning culture.

And? You can already do that. You just cant "hide" it.

You had to have a permit before.

This isn’t newsworthy.

Prayer should keep everyone safe.

Upvoting because I read this as tongue-in-cheek.

Why would Hackernews find this relevant?

Perhaps because it sounds so foreign to the rest of the world that it's automatically interesting.

Agree

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian...

Well, the one who draws faster wins. I'd expect nothing less from Texas.

Indeed, there's definitely an appetite for bizarre/weird stories on HN and as someone who lives outside of the US this seems totally bizarre to me. Even more bizarre that some other states already allow this.

But actually, not that interesting to me. Provided they stay out there and shoot amongst themselves as is their "God-given right", or whatever it is.

It's "hardware news"?

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