Competing Bills
The other two bills introduced by Republicans during the 1871 legislative session were set aside in favor of Grothaus’s HB 115. Since we already have a sense of what that law entailed, it is easier to see the shortcomings of these two.
House Bill 258 was introduced by William Sheriff of Fort Bend County, near Houston. In the years following the Civil War, Fort Bend was a Black-majority county and retained a strong Republican Party presence through the decade of the 1880s. This was an impressive feat since the Democrats retook control of the state legislature and most of the county governments during the mid-1870s. The strength and determination of the Black community and its allies enabled this resistance against the “redemption” of Fort Bend County by local Democrats. William Sheriff, a Radical Republican, may well have been one of these allies.
HB258 was, generally speaking, quite similar to HB 115. The key difference was that Sheriff’s bill narrowed quite substantially the opportunity to be exempted from the law. He included an exception for frontier counties, but not a blanket one for travelers. If Sheriff had had it his way, the only travelers who would have been able to carry deadly weapons were the ones going either to Mexico or the “Indian frontier” counties. And even then, the traveler in question would have been required to appear before his local District Clerk to explain the situation, pay a fee, and obtain a temporary public-carry license. The Twelfth Legislature was the most radical one of the nineteenth century, but its members were not so radical that they would support this cumbersome policy.
The other contender, House Bill 312, was introduced by Francis Franks of Wharton County, near the Houston area and adjacent to Black-majority Fort Bend County. The Franks bill was also structurally similar to HB 115 in its attempt to comprehensively proscribe deadly weapons carried openly or concealed. However, Franks did a poor job of defining which weapons would be prohibited. His bill outlawed carrying “any Sword cane, dagger or knife of any description, except a pocket Knife”—phrasing that would have forced judges to define the subtle difference between a “knife of any description” versus a “pocket knife.”
Franks’s definition of pistols was even more problematic. He started off with “any Kind of fire arms called and known as pistols, the term being extended to include Revolvers and every variety of small arms now in use.” This vague, nebulous language likely would have generated a great deal of appellate court cases centering on creating legal definitions for these terms. The worst part actually came last, which was an effort by Franks to include as-yet undeveloped firearms “that may hereafter be invented that might properly come under that designation.” This language of prohibiting future inventions may well have been considered unconstitutional, though it does reinforce to us that technological developments greatly complicated the endeavor of arms regulation during the Gilded Age.