I understand and agree with what you said. I would add a couple of things.Jusme wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 9:58 am
However, the resistance of allowing carry here in Texas, has very deep roots. It hasn't been very long ago, that Texas was held in a death grip, by left wing Democrats. The disarmament of Texans, started a long time ago, and while there may be some attitudes imported from both the left and right coasts, there is still a prevailing attitude among those in power, that only LEO are trustworthy enough to carry guns. It took ousting our last Democrat Governor, to even get concealed carry passed, and even then there were a lot of restrictions, and it was cost prohibitive for a lot of people. We were viewed as a very quaint group, who got to play with guns, but our numbers were so low, that we had almost no voice.
That has changed in recent years, but that attitude towards us still remains. Third and fourth generation, judges, city council persons, county Sheriffs, etc. still hold on to those attitudes, because " that's the way it's always been" and they don't like State legislator's to tell them what they can do locally.
- It isn't just the politicians who believe that the LEOs should be the only ones to carry. There seems to be a percentage of LEOs themselves with this view. I hesitate to to suggest a an actual percentage but in my anecdotal experience it is greater than 10%
- there is a share of the population to whom some of the politicians are responding who are almost violently anti-gun. Too many of them (my view) come from the teaching ranks and spread their bias.With the overall polarization that is occurring within the electorate, some who might have been Liberal in some social or financial views have gone "all in" with the Progressive agenda, moving from what once might have been a neutral stance on guns and particularly concealed carry to becoming as militant on those topics as they are others. As evidence, I would point to the number of groups who passed out 30.06/.07 signs when open carry passed. Whether iit is just the natives are just drinking the political Kool-Aide or there are profound changes because of public discourse on guns is not clear to me. What is clear is that the subject of EBRs (AR-15s,etc) comes up more than anything else soon as gun topics are raised. I was very concerned that OC would push carrying at all into that category, too. Even the people who are emphatically anti-gun that I've run into are very much in denial about what the large numbers of LTCs in Texas actually means in terms of the numbers of people who CC around them on a daily basis.