The traitor responsible for the continued violations of the constitution of the U.S. and of Texas law is none other than a sworn defender of the same, Olmos police chief Rene Valenciano.  He is an awful person who cares not the least about lying and abandoning his oath.

So the claims on their web site are all lies.  He and his traitor officers have no intention of obeying Texas law, in which open carry is legal.  This also raises yet another question: where the hell is the Texas attorney general?  A police chief is violating Texas law and infringing on constitutionally protected rights.  Where is the Texas attorney general on this?  Missing in action?

Police chief Rene Valenciano’s email address is: policechief@olmospark.org.  Feel free to tell him he’s a traitor.  The city manager is Celia DeLeon, and her email address is: citymanager@olmospark.org.  Is she a coward?  Just why hasn’t she shut down Valenciano’s traitorous henchmen yet?  Is she waiting for a massive lawsuit that bankrupts the city?

By the way, police chief.  That fat boy officer in the video, yea, him.  Tell him to go on a diet, put on a backpack, and hit the trails.

And as for my readers in Texas (I know I have a lot of them), you know what to do next.

BoingBoing:

Appears the new open carry laws in Texas, which have expressly allowed guns onto College campuses and into psychiatric hospitals, are back firing against open and concealed carry enthusiasts. Private business and property owners can ban firearms from their property by either posting signs, or verbally informing armed people they are not welcome to carry their weapons. Firearms enthusiasts are finding a lot of new signs around Texas.

Ooo …, “backfiring.”  Sounds serious, yes?  Their source is The Trace.

“Got an email from work telling us that not only are 30.07 signs going up over the weekend on our office building but 30.06 as well. What makes this even more frustrating is I have yet to see a single open carry,” wrote a user with the handle LTUME1978, before predicting in a subsequent comment that, at least in Houston, “Once the signs are up, they are not ever going to come down.”

That original post generated more than 100 replies, and numerous theories. Some Texas CHL users speculated that the increase in notices barring concealed weapons may be due to a revision to the existing 30.06 sign that was ushered in by the new open carry legislation. Older 30.06 signage was rendered obsolete by the change — and signage is something that Texas gun rights advocates actively police.

“Just as easy to have both 30.06 and 30.07 signs made at the same time,” a user named Distinguished Rick replied. “We have lost more than we gained,” he added. “I have had my CHL 20 years this year and I hardly ran into any legal signs back then. This has woken up the anti-crowd in a big way. So now the genie is out of the bottle and I don’t see a way to put it back.”

A user with the handle bmwrdr echoed his concerns: “Before the OC [open carry] movement started everything went smooth, now we see more and more 30.06 signs erected.”

Another user, posting as flowrie, theorized that the backlash generated by the open carry movement, which was itself driven by the gun rights group Open Carry Texas (OCT), was so spectacular that it may as well have been an opposition plot. “OCT has hurt much more than helped. I insist on carrying when taking my young son and wife to the movies, but that is now becoming more difficult. I do not really oppose OC, but the way they went about it was unwise and just down right ignorant. I too wonder if some of them are anti-2A [Second Amendment]. If I were anti-2A, that’s how I would do it.”

“We were free to carry concealed at far more places before than now. You have the exact same ability to be safe carrying concealed as openly. Except that now you can’t do either in many places. So you’re not safer at all. Open carry is not a right. It’s a dress code and comfort issue. You were already freely bearing arms before 1 Jan. You’ve given up safety for comfort and lost and freedom [sic] for all of us.”

“The immature, selfish actions and the loud, belligerent mouths of a few have hurt many,” Oldgringo concluded. “It’s true, all that glitters is not gold.”

What a bunch of whiny little bitches.  If it takes some time to work through the details of this, then so be it.  If you have to continue to work through concealed and open carry rights issues, then so be it.  If you have to petition businesses or otherwise withhold your patronage in order to persuade businesses to honor your rights, then so be it.  A business who indiscriminately posts signs prohibiting both open and concealed carry isn’t worth my patronage anyway.

Shouting down the advocates of open carry is turning your criticism on the wrong people when you’ve got culpable establishments to target.  Open carry advocates didn’t force businesses to put up signs prohibiting concealed carry.  Other states have learned to deal with this, and Texas will too.  Settle down.  Mind your manners, grow up and stop being little girls over this.

Fusion.net:

Texas is starting off the new year with a bang: A statewide gun law that doesn’t make much sense.

“Unfortunately, this law was not written very well. It’s not very clear…I can read it one way, I can read it another way,” said Donna Edmundson, the city attorney for Houston, at a town hall meeting two months ago. The law—which will make Texas the 45th and largest state to allow citizens with permits to openly carry handguns—goes into effect on January 1.

But by the end of that hour-and-a-half session, which was also attended by the police chief and district attorney, very little had been resolved.

Now, as they anticipate anticipate an uptick in 911 calls reporting people walking the streets with guns, police departments across the state are still trying to figure out how—and if—they can enforce the law, which legal experts say is marked with gaping loopholes and ambiguities.

For one thing, legal experts say, it’s not clear if the law allows police to detain someone who they suspect is open carrying without a license. Some districts are training police to ask to see a license only if an individual is engaging in otherwise suspicious activity. Others say they are free to ask because there is reasonable suspicion that the person may be committing a crime—unlawfully carrying a gun without a license.

Even trickier for police officers is what happens when a citizen is asked and refuses to show proof of an open-carry license. According to the Dallas Morning News, there is no penalty in the law for license holders who refuse to do so:

[C]ase law in Texas could prohibit police from arresting that person, since the action has no penalty.

But if the person isn’t a license holder, the officer can arrest him for unlawfully carrying a gun. So at what point does an officer know enough — like the person’s identity and whether he’s a license holder — to determine whether to make an arrest?

In other words, as it is written, the new open carry law is nearly impossible to enforce, said Geoffrey Corn, a professor of law at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “It’s kind of like a Catch-22,” he told Fusion. Carrying without a license is illegal, but there’s no clear way for police to investigate if the person does indeed have a license to open carry or not.

“The way it’s gonna end up is that police are gonna have encounters with people who are open carrying that are going to escalate, and that are going to lead to an arrest,” Corn said. “And then that’s going to lead to defense attorneys saying the whole thing was tainted, and that the seizure was illegal because he had right to carry.”

Originally, the bill had a “no stop” provision, which barred police from asking anyone for their open carry license. Law enforcement groups fought it, saying it would prevent police from doing their jobs, while endangering the public. In response to that pressure, the bill was rewritten in its current form.

“Traditionally, the way legislatures tackle hard problems is to leave it to the courts,” George Dix, a professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law, told Fusion. “In this case, I suspect there was no politically acceptable language they could agree on, so they left it up to others to decide.”

The officials who pushed the bill through saw it as mostly a symbolic measure, he speculated. They weren’t necessarily concerned with how it would be enforced.

For all its problems, there is one thing abundantly clear with the new law: seeing someone on the street with a gun is not enough of a reason to detain them and ask for their license. Seeing someone with a firearm no longer makes them suspicious in the eyes of the law, even as regular citizens might be alarmed at the sight.

“What a lot of police are worried about is not that there’s gonna be open carry, but that there’s going to be a deliberate effort to exercise that right in what I might characterize as an ‘unusually zealous’ way,” said Corn. “And there can be a lot of chaos in those circumstances.”

Deliberate, mind you.  Not accidental, but someone exercising a right deliberately.  Deliberately!  And not only that, but in an “unusually zealous” way!

So tell us Mr. Corn.  What does it mean to deliberately exercise a right in an “unusually zealous” way?  Be precise, please.  Legally precise.  And explain how that can be chaotic.

Or perhaps this is just some bullshit term made up for some bullshit article over something that won’t end up mattering a hill of beans to most people?  Which is it, Mr. Corn?

The Austin-American Statesman is carrying an opinion piece by John Lott on the open carry bills in Texas.  It is subscription, but Mr. Lott also mirrors the entire commentary on the web site Crime Prevention Research Center (where he is president).  Mr. Lott felt the latitude to undercut the Austin-American Statesman by publishing the entire piece on his site, but I will only provide excerpts.

With well over 700,000 concealed handgun permit holders in Texas, there is a good chance that someone next you in a grocery store or restaurant is carrying a concealed handgun. But some are only satisfied if others actually know that they are carrying.  They think that by openly carrying guns they can make others comfortable with guns. They want to make a statement.

Texas lawmakers are now wrestling with the questions of campus carry and open carry. They couldn’t face a clearer choice between enhancing safety or making political statements.

Open carry advocates carry rifles because they can’t legally openly carry handguns. While no problems have occurred, simply handling a rifle as opposed to keeping a handgun in a holster, raises the risk that something might go wrong.

Open carry advocates have not been the best at public relations and they have scared some people. Much has been made of supposed gun bans by Starbucks, Jack in the Box, Chipotle, Wendy’s, Applebee’s, Chili’s and Sonic’s supposedly banning guns. In fact, these companies merely “respectfully request” that customers not openly carry guns. Passing an open carry law where proponents carried handguns, instead of rifles, would be less threatening and thus likely make it less of a PR issue.

Still, there is a more basic problem with open carry – it isn’t as effective in protecting people.

Criminals and terrorists can strike anywhere and at any time, that gives them a huge strategic advantage. When an attacker sees someone openly carrying a gun, they can either attack that person or wait for a more opportune moment. Alternatively, they can select another target.

Concealed carry makes attacks riskier. A killer can’t attack an auditorium in Texas without facing near-certain resistance. And, of course, an attacker has no idea who might be packing heat.

[ … ]

Open carry isn’t bad, but concealed carry is better. There are more important changes to be made. At $140, Texas has one of the highest permit fees in the US. Lower fees would increase the number of people who can protect others. It would especially help those who are most likely to be victims of violent crime — poor blacks living in high-crime urban areas.

If safety is the goal, let’s eliminate gun-free zones or lower permit fees. Open carry may make a political statement, but is that really the top priority?

In order fully to answer this, I have to point folks back to an article I wrote entitled Suburban Battle Rattle.  I didn’t write this to be silly, trivial or even tendentious.  I did it in order to get feedback from readers about what they do and how they approach this subject.

Mike Vanderboegh linked it, and one reader in particular put me on edge by saying this.

I would not recommend an ankle rig unless it was for your “third gun”. For years I worked plain clothes assignments as a DA Investigator. I was in some of the worst areas of SoCal. My duty weapon was a Glock 19 in a very secure DeSantis rig on my right hip. In my left front pants pocket was a S&W model 37 with a bobbed hammer in a Galco pocket rig. Extra mags were on my belt and in the left pocket of my sport coat, I kept an impact device, edged device, and a few other lightweight goodies.

If you have to evac and area in a hurry, ankle rigs will not only slow you down, they can loosen and start spinning around your ankle. Been there, done that.

The best weapon I had was the one between my two ears. Situational awareness and OODA techniques kept me in one piece until I was eligible to retire. H/T to Mr. Mike: I did not poke any wolverines in their nether regions unless I had a good plan in place and a secure method of egress.

” …ankle rigs will not only slow you down, they can loosen and start spinning around your ankle. Been there, done that.”  I don’t so much disagree with him, as dismiss it as bluster if he doesn’t back it all up by political action and other necessary things to force changes to both law and cultural norms to allow open carry.  Let me explain a bit and then I’ll get back to John Lott.

I’ve had my ankle rig swing around on me too, and beyond that, if I needed it quickly I am hampered by the location of the weapon and its being covered by my trousers.  But it’s one thing to complain about ankle rigs while you’re a LEO who can open carry, and quite another to work to change the situation for those of us who cannot open carry all of the time.

Even though my own home state is a traditional open carry state, I cannot open carry all of the time because of cultural norms.  Sometimes I am left with concealed carry IWB or ankle rig.  I find IWB carry obnoxious for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: (1) sweat and body oils rust and corrode your weapon, (2) it’s uncomfortable, and (3) you must use a small handgun or print your clothing.

With swollen knuckles due to my arthritis, I cannot efficiently handle small frame subcompacts (I do just fine with larger frame weapons).  So I am left with a large frame weapon which weighs too much and prints at my side.  I may as well use a rigger’s belt and open carry, which I find significantly more comfortable than IWB carry.  I’m saying all of this to suggest that Lott’s assertion that open carry is done in order to make a political statement is both insulting and ignorant.  When I open carry, I don’t do it to make any kind of statement.

But beyond being insulting and ignorant, Lott’s procedure is the same as he has used before, and it is as objectionable as it has always been.  As I’ve stated before:

“What happens to society at the macroscopic level is immaterial.  My rights involve me and my family, and don’t depend on being able to demonstrate that the general health effects in society are not a corollary to or adversely affected by the free exercise of them.  It’s insidious and even dangerous to argue gun rights as a part of crime prevention based on statistics because it presupposes what the social planners do, i.e., that I’m part of the collective.”  I object to John Lott’s procedure, and have stated frequently that I do not believe in the second amendment.  I believe in God.  The Almighty grants me the rights to be armed, and when the Almighty has spoken, it is eternal law for all men everywhere and in all ages and epochs.  See also Holding Human Rights Hostage To Favorable Statistical Outcomes, and Kurt Hoffman on the same subject.

And that’s the main problem with John Lott and his procedure.  If you need to, read his commentary above again, very carefully.  He doesn’t come right out and say he is opposed to the legalization of open carry, but he spends his entire time trying to prove that it is inferior to concealed carry, and ends with the question, is it “really a top priority?”

He is trying to talk the Texas legislators into letting the bills perish in committee.  It isn’t good enough for him to enable the practice of God-given rights.  It isn’t good enough for him to couple with other gun rights activists to press forward to the enjoyment of more freedom.  No, for some inexplicable reason he must work to undermine the gun rights community and be divisive and schismatic.  Being quiet isn’t good enough.  He must engage in chest pounding, blathering on in front of people about how much he knows.  As to how much he supposedly knows, I do Monte Carlo particle transport calculations, worrying over things like the first, second and third moments of a problem, sampling statistics, variance reduction and meeting the central limit theorem.  John Lott doesn’t impress me (with his anecdotal accounts in the distribution “tails”) any more than the VPC or Brady gun controllers.

Ironically, while various anti-gun groups such as the VPC attempt to use arguments like this to prohibit the practice of God-given rights by a subterfuge of worthless “statistics” they don’t really understand, John Lott attempts to do the very same thing under the guise of being safe and ensuring the best response to potential attackers.  He is more like the anti-gun crowd than he would be willing to admit.  It isn’t enough that we must do battle with the collectivists to ensure the free exercise of our rights.  We must also do battle with self-proclaimed gun rights advocates like John Lott.  Working to legalize open carry in Texas doesn’t change cultural norms, but it’s a starting point.  Those of us who favor such legalization will have to step over the “gun rights” activists to make this happen.

We just discussed how at least one of the proposed pieces of legislation in Texas is licensed open carry.  A deal may very well have been struck well before the session concerning what the Governor expected to come to his desk.  This isn’t the only open carry bill in Texas, and so the show isn’t over yet.  But there is a cold wind blowing concerning the promises made to the voters.

Texas never met a gun-rights bill it didn’t like.

But if one actually fails to pass the Legislature this session, the author of the state’s 1995 handgun permit law knows why.

A bill to allow Texans to pack pistols without a permit won’t pass “because of the Tarrant County open-carry group’s obnoxious behavior,” former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson warned by email Tuesday.

Earlier Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said a different bill allowing open carry with a permit “does not reach to the level of prioritizing” before adjournment June 1.

Basically, Patterson said, that bill might have a chance if Open Carry Tarrant County stays home.

Patrick’s comment will “stir up a lot of folks,” Patterson wrote, adding: “I hope these folks don’t make another scene.”

Patterson called that “foolish.” Watkins’ comment: “Shame on you.”

Patterson wants the Legislature to pass bills allowing open carry and carrying at public colleges, both with a permit.

Since he worked hard for permits, he likes them.

Consider me shocked – a member of the ruling class likes it when the government gets to approve or disapprove of rights.  The promise strategically didn’t include constitutional carry, and the so-called “obnoxious” behavior of open carry advocates has given him a convenient excuse for something he never wanted to do in the first place.

Another report (thanks to MackH) tells us more about the political machinations.

Speaking the day after pro-gun advocates again flocked to the state Capitol, Patrick said he thought “Second Amendment rights are important” but he didn’t think “there’s support in the Legislature to pass” a bill to legalize the open carry of handguns. In Texas, you can openly tote long arms like rifles and AR-15s, but the same has been illegal for handguns for more than 125 years.

“On open carry I’ve been very consistent, that if the votes are there, the bill will pass out of the Senate,” said Patrick. “But I’m not an open carry person myself. I wouldn’t open carry but I respect people’s right who want to.”

[ … ]

While Patrick’s comments on open carry Tuesday morning were nothing new – he ‘s made similar statements on news programs and at town hall meetings in the recent past – they seem to contradict campaign material that promised the then state senator and radio show host would more actively support the effort. On his campaign website, one of the five “Second Amendment” issues Patrick lists as priorities is to “fight for open carry.” A campaign ad also includes a promise to “support” the effort.

In a retweet of a San Antonio Express-News story from November 2013, Patrick campaign consultant Allen Blakemore also stated, “@DanPatrick supports open carry.”

If this all sounds like politicians making promises in order to get elected and then reverting collectivist after being elected, it’s because that’s exactly what happened.  And as to the propaganda that this all has to do with those “obnoxious” open carriers, Sebastian fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Remember, before their little stunt, this was supposedly a done deal … So far all all the OC Tarrant County folks have accomplished this session is getting the legislature to install panic buttons, and scuttling a bill that looked like it had the legs to pass. What else will they manage to accomplish in this legislative session?

Right.  They’re all a-skeered of the open carriers, enough to install “panic buttons.”  It sounds to me like they aren’t a-skeerd enough.  The legislators are supposed to be in our employ, and maybe what they need to see is more voters carrying guns.

As for the open carry bill they floated, I’d sooner have nothing.  As I’ve said, licensed open carry in a state with no stop and identify statute for enforcement is a shooting-by-cop waiting to happen.  And I certainly don’t support empowering the police state any more by giving them a stop and identify statute.  That would be making something bad even worse.

Gun rights advocates are better off to hold out for constitutional carry rather than begging for scraps that fall from the master’s table.  As for Texas politicians, color me unimpressed.  They seem like a lot of hot air and no action or honesty.  I guess the underhanded, conniving, bullying days of Bob Bullock are still going strong even as Bob lays in the grave.