Photo Courtesy of Todd Wiseman, Texas Tribune
We’ve reported before on Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to flip Texas blue, and while that was a laughable idea fifteen years ago, it’s a very real possibility today.
Bloomberg is putting his money where his mouth is. In addition to putting nearly $8 million dollars into the 2020 election in Texas — in hopes of replacing weak and moderate Republicans like he did in Virginia — Bloomberg wants to do more.
That’s why his Everytown for Gun Safety organization has tasked their in-house law firm with filing anti-gun lawsuits in the state. Their latest lawsuit objects to the fact that Texas has an official sign which businesses must post if they want gun owners to leave their guns at home.
In reality, the requirement is pretty simple: if you don’t want concealed carry, post a 30.06 sign. If you don’t want open carry, post a 30.07 sign. If you don’t want either, post both signs.
That’s all! But Everytown wants any old printed sheet of paper saying “No Guns” to be good enough — because criminals will obey a sign like that, of course.
In reality, no sign is necessary at all: the business owner or employee needs only to ask the gun owner to leave and they will. If they don’t leave, they can be charged with trespassing.
But for Bloomberg’s Everytown, they don’t like that the law because it ‘places an undue burden’ on the business owner.
If these property owners use other means of indicating that firearms are not welcome on the premises—even if entirely reasonable and understandable—they cannot avail themselves of Texas’s criminal trespass laws. By contrast, property owners who wish to exclude others for any other reason at all do not face these same burdens. This viewpoint-based discrimination was entirely intentional; the Texas state land commissioner who drafted these requirements admits that he “intentionally made the sign’s language cumbersome” to discourage businesses from prohibiting entry to customers carrying guns.
Playing The Long Game
This whining didn’t start today with Everytown. It’s been going on in Bloomberg’s organizations in Texas for two years.
It was over two years ago when the Mad Commie Mommies were complaining to the Austin American-Statesmen newspaper:
The Moms Demand Action members say some gun owners are “gaming” the system by ignoring a property owner’s wishes if the sign doesn’t fit literally the one-inch letter of the law or violates other specifics.
They showed me numerous screen shots listing establishments with allegedly illegal signs. The assumption, at least based on the Internet conversations, is that an armed customer can’t be convicted of criminal trespass if the sign isn’t technically correct.
“We saw it was being deliberately exploited by ‘law abiding’ gun owners,” Burke said. “From a mom’s perspective, if I’m at the hospital with my child and see a no guns sign, I shouldn’t have to worry that the mom next to me has a gun.”
What Is This Really About?
Bloomberg wants to make it even easier for businesses to ban guns and make it even harder for gun owners to know where they can and can’t carry. That sort of confusion about legality usually prompts gun owners to leave their weapons at home, since the ramifications of not being in compliance with the law are pretty steep.
Nobody wants to have their life ruined because they missed a 4 inch square of paper on the bottom of the door of the business they were walking into.
Meanwhile, the Texas Land Commissioner who passed the signage requirement thinks that the claim that it’s a burden on businesses is a joke.
“They’re complaining that the sign is too prominent essentially,” Patterson told Houston Public Media. “But if it’s that important to them, would they feel good with a two-inch-by-two-inch sign that had a handgun with a red circle around it and a red diagonal bar across it that nobody’s going to see?”
This is how the left works. Death by a thousands cuts. Taking away our gun rights by hook or by crook. If they can’t outright ban them or confiscate them, they’ll make it impossible to know when and where to carry — and thus convince gun owners not to carry at all!
Once they’ve cut the pool of gun owners — and gun carriers — by a significant enough percentage, they’ll move to pass the laws banning them, confiscating them, etc.
Wear down your opponent. Attack on every possible front. That’s their game. Will it work in Texas?