Licensing & Fee
Where the antebellum gun control movement focused on bringing Texas into alignment with other southern states by enacting a concealed weapons bill, the post-Civil War movement went in an altogether different direction. The larger atmosphere of racial violence and political instability made the idea of doing something about rampant gun-toting a rather popular one. But here is the hiccup: the Conservative Party (basically the old Democratic Party leadership) that initially controlled the state government after the war, from 1865 to 1867, had different policy preferences as compared to those Texans who joined the fledgling Republican Party in 1866 and later.
Conservatives preferred licensing procedures, like the one outlined here in Senate Bill 14. The Eleventh Legislature, which met in 1866 and was dominated by Conservatives (many of whom had supported secession), debated the merits of no fewer than seven bills pertaining to the public carrying and use of firearms. The one bill whose text survives is SB 14 (1866), sponsored by Robert Guinn of Cherokee County in East Texas.
The Guinn bill called for a “license tax” of five dollars for anyone wanting to carry a deadly weapon in public. Applicants would have to go to the Assessor and Collector of Taxes to pay the fee, then take the receipt to the County Judge. The bill seems to provide the judge some discretion in deciding whether paid-up applicants would still be approved. Should the judge approve, the Clerk of the County Court would make a note of the licensee and the type of weapon he wanted to carry, then issue a permit. The applicant would finally have to enter into a bond or surety to keep the peace—meaning he had to have financial backing up to $1,000.
There were some important features within this bill which remained a part of state-level public carry jurisprudence in Texas for a long time. The first was the exemptions for travelers and those living along the “Indian frontier.” Guinn may have crafted a bill that was clunky in some ways, and used “license” and “permit” interchangeably, but he took care to define the terms “traveler” and “Indian frontier”—something which later bills failed to do. Without precise definitions in the text of a law, it falls to judges to interpret what the key terms actually mean, and the process has the potential to undermine the intentions of the lawmakers who crafted the statute in question.
Another feature of the Guinn bill was its requirement that the weapon could only be used “in defence of himself or his property.” In other words, permit-holders were not given permission to use their special status for the purpose of instigating “difficulties” or seeking vengeance against those without permits. That sounds like a fine idea, but from the perspective of most Texans, who would’ve lacked the financial means and social standing to obtain a permit in the first place, the policy only increased their vulnerability to intimidation.
Guinn’s bill did not become law. Even though Conservatives controlled the government at the time and preferred licensing and fees as a solution to rampant gun-toting, there were significant obstacles that derailed the legislation. How much should a permit cost? How high should the barrier of entry be? Which weapons should be taxed, and should there be different rates for different weapons? Conservatives simply could not agree on answers to these questions because cash-poor Texans balked at having to “pay for the privilege” of carrying a pistol for self-defense in a disturbingly violent environment.