My point was though that the legislature has failed us for over a hundred years, and nothing on the horizon is a driver for change. We don't even have an effective lobby to the legislature. The TSRA is lobbying to merely appease the most vocal opponents to gun control. If anything, in my mind, that's counter productive to restoring the rights of all Texans. They aren't doing anything to represent people like my wife, a teacher, who is so intimidated by the gun laws on the books that she won't exercise her right.
We do have access to the courts, and the 7th Circuit just ruled that they agree the Heller and McDonald rulings do apply to public possession of guns. They ruled again that states will have to justify any restrictions with more than a mere rational basis, almost ridiculing that the states' arguments wouldn't meet even a rational basis standard. The 2nd Amendment applies to the states. The right includes self defense with common weapons. The right applies to public settings, not just in the home. All of this is brand new territory for the states. Texas laws have never lived up to any of these standards.
The 46.02 law flat out bans the possession of handguns on it's face. It was written against a state constitutional standard that gave the legislature the power to regulate our right however they chose. It stood beyond a constitutional amendment intended to specifically limit that power and repeal the 1871 act. It stood after the reconstruction governor that signed it had to be removed from office at the Capital by armed citizens. It stands today banning possession, in the face of the plain language of the constitution that grants the legislature only the power to regulate the wearing of arms, not banning possession. It's been upheld, for example in State v Duke, only with respect to precedence from cases like Cruikshank and Slaughterhouse. The only case law upholding the Texas law, and even the Texas constitution itself, are flawed by the same reasoning the Supreme court has already addressed in Heller and McDonald.
We have the SAF going after cases like in North Carolina where the states citizen's rights are only violated sometimes, like in declared emergencies. No doubt that's important, but I don't understand how that's more important than in Texas where all citizens have been denied their rights for well over one hundred years. Rather than focusing on lobbying the legislature, why doesn't an organization like opencarry.org focus on fighting for our rights in the judiciary?