Some Texas officials are saying that state law allowing people to carry rifles openly led to some confusion during the shoot-out Thursday that left five police officers dead, seven others and two civilians wounded in the streets of Dallas during what had been a peaceful protest of police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. Also killed, with a robot-delivered bomb, was the killer, Micah Xavier Johnson.
At the Dallas march, there were as many as 30 people carrying semi-automatic AR-15 rifles or their imitators. That would be shocking in many states, but not in Texas, where gun laws have been loosened over the past three decades. No permit is needed to carry rifles or shotguns openly and loaded on Texas streets. People who carry handguns, however, must have permits whether they carry their firearms concealed or openly. More than a million Texans have concealed-carry permits.
Open-carry made it more difficult to distinguish suspects from protesters. In fact, a tweet sent by the Dallas Police Department while the shootout was still going on included a photo of a man armed with an AR-15, saying he was a “suspect.” He was later identified as Mark Hughes and released, having had nothing to do with the shooting. But the potential for police—or vigilantes—to shoot such as suspect under adrenaline-laced circumstances is obvious. Manny Fernandez, Alan Blinder and David Montgomery report:
Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas suggested in an interview on Sunday that, in the wake of the attack, he supported tightening the state’s gun laws to restrict the carrying of rifles and shotguns in public.
“There should be some way to say I shouldn’t be bringing my shotgun to a Mavericks game or to a protest because something crazy should happen,” said Mr. Rawlings, a Democrat. “I just want to come back to common sense.”
The state’s open-carry culture, the mayor said, had imperiled people on the streets of Dallas. “This is the first time — but a very concrete time — that I think a law can hurt citizens, police and not protect them,” he said, adding that he was not anti-gun and that he owned a shotgun himself. “I think it’s amazing when you think that there is a gunfight going on, and you are supposed to be able to sort who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”
But the situation appears unlikely to lead to any change in the law even though maintaining it on the books seems like a guarantee that someday an armed civilian will kill another armed civilian in the mistaken belief they’re taking out a bad guy. Or the police will do the same. The gun culture in Texas is too big an obstacle. “From my perspective, I don’t see anything changing in Texas,” said Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, who represents El Paso.
Part of the message from open-carry advocates is that that law deters possible criminals when civilians can respond to a rifle-toting shooter with their own firearms. Yet with 20-30 people carrying rifles at the Dallas protest, not a single one of them got off a shot at Johnson.