SeamusTX answered correctly about some exceptions being covered by case law. Others are not.denwego wrote: If you go by a pure, unexpanded, literal reading of PC Chapter 46, there is no exception whatsoever for touching a handgun in a gun store, nor carrying one back to your car after you buy it (and before the MPA, no way to drive it back to your residence).
I don't know if the cited case law covers "possessing, on or about one's person" a handgun while handling it in a gun store, but I do know that there's no statutory exemption. Just like there's no statutory exemption for a non-CHL carrying an unloaded handgun in a locked case into a gun show in hopes of trading or selling it. The gun shop employee OCing has exactly the same statutory protection: none.
For those of us who focus on the dangerousness of laws by how they might be abused, rather than not worrying about it because they're "not intended" to apply to "us good folks", these gray areas are extremely troublesome. I'm as opposed to "zero tolerance" policies as anyone, but that's because I believe the laws shouldn't be written so broadly and stupidly as to result in injust outcomes when someone wasn't doing wrong. I also believe the laws should be equally enforced, and the fastest way to change a stupidly broad law is to enforce it with zero tolerance. And that's what prompted the change in Texas: regular law-abiding middle class white folks became afraid to carry as their peers had done for decades, because they were now at risk of being arrested, where their forebears weren't.
Just imagine how much quicker we'd have achieved legal carry in Texas if UCW had been enforced with as much "zero tolerance" against pillar-of-the-community white widows on their way to church, as it was against Jose the carpenter or Roosevelt the barber.
The solution to bad laws that are inequitably applied: repeal them. Let's start with completely eliminating PC Chapter 46, which would put us back on par with Vermont. If there is enough demand for a license for purposes of reciprocity, we can add that separately, and be equal with Alaska and Arizona.