County Officials Stage 'Open Carry' Forum

ROUND ROCK, TX -- Law enforcement officials Monday evening staged an educational meeting on the upcoming “open carry” law allowing registered gun owners to openly carry their weapons in public.

The well-attended forum at Round Rock City Hall included overviews from top local law enforcement leaders: Round Rock Police Department Training Commander Jim Stuart; Georgetown Police Department Assistant Chief of Police Cory Tchida; and Williamson County Attorney Dee Hobbs.

Area residents were invited to ask questions during the hour-long gathering both in person and through social media outlets such as Facebook or Twitter.

The meeting was intended to apprise the public on details related to the new law, as well as to allay fears over the imminent specter of seeing people walking around with their weapons in full view—both as a deterrent for would-be assailants or merely as an expression of their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

“One of the concerns we have is people are trying to attach a hostile thing to someone having a weapon on them because it’s new,” Stuart said. ”They’re just exercising their right to carry their weapon in the open.”

He made the analogy to a car—a potentially menacing instrument of destruction in its own right—that is nonetheless something people are allowed to have.

Tchida agreed with the assessment: “I don’t know why you would treat them as hostile coming into your establishment. People who are open-carrying, the vast majority are law-abiding citizens and need to be treated as such.”

One questioner asked if he would be forced to leave a business if its owner opted not to allow guns in his establishment.

Yes, panelists said; despite the new law, a business owner’s protocols trumping open carry.

Another resident asked: What if he’s at a diner and a server takes offense at the sight of a visible gun but then the manager approaches and says he’s okay with it? Does the manager, in outranking the server in hierarchy, speak for the business?

Would the manager’s position supersede the server’s?

That’s when things got hazy. Because the law has yet to take effect, how it might truly manifest itself remains an abstraction. Despite extensive training to which Stuart alluded that law enforcement members have undergone in advance of open carry, panelists weren’t able to specifically address such conjecture.

“We’d probably be called out at that point,” Stuart said. “We’ll probably have to sort it out for you.”

Hobbs agreed with that likelihood: “Law enforcement would have to be called, and they’ll have to sort it out at that point.”

Contradictions—and no small measure of irony—emerged during talk of the law’s actual implementation. While law enforcement officials seemed to voice support on the ideals of open-carry, they noted members of the public won’t be allowed to openly carry their firearms in government buildings—including their offices.

“The City of Georgetown traditionally has not allowed employees to carry weapons, and that will continue,” Tchida said. “We cannot prohibit an employee from having that weapon in their car, but the City of Georgetown will continue not to have weapons on their person during the workday.”

The same goes for Round Rock, Stuart said. “Unless your job requires you to carry one, like a police officer, you won’t be allowed to.”

Last month, the Department of Public Safety issued a similar decree in barring its non-police employees from openly carrying handguns on the job. Other places where open carry of firearms will continue to be prohibited include courthouses and schools, local officials said.

A woman in the audience asked if statistics were available from current open-carry states related to increased incidents of road rage or other violent outbursts that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred were it not for ready gun access.

Panelists were unfamiliar with such empirical data: “I’m not aware of any information like that,” Stuart said.

While panelists suggested open carry law is pretty straightforward, they alluded to the more detailed nuances of a companion law for university campuses—the so-called “campus carry” initiative. The delayed implementation of that version until August illustrates its greater complexity, Stuart said.

On the same night of the session, State Attorney General issued a non-binding opinion contradicting plans by some universities to continue banning guns in dormitories, despite the new law. The timing of his legal opinion inadvertently shed further light into the more pronounced nuances of campus carry law alluded to during the meeting in Round Rock.

Also on hand at the 7 p.m. session to answer questions were other Williamson County officials, including chief investigator Melissa Hightower; Assistant County Attorney Shannon C. Francis; and criminal intake prosecutor Matthew Watkins.

The meeting was live streamed and is available for later viewing at roundrocktexas.gov/tv.