Texas DPS: Reenactors Can Carry Outside Capitol But Not Second Amendment Activists

Reenactors fire their black powder rifles while gun rights activists stand with empty holsters

Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
January 19, 2014

The Texas Department of Public Safety banned a gun rights group from carrying black powder firearms outside the capitol today despite allowing historical reenactors to fire their rifles on the capitol grounds this afternoon.

Over the past several months, Texas state troopers have arrested at least three citizens for carrying black powder pistols outside the capitol, citing them under gun laws even though Texas statues do not recognize black powder pistols as firearms. Photo credit: Rama via Wiki

Outside the state capitol building, the Descendants of Confederate Veterans fired three volleys from their black powder rifles while several hundred activists at the Gun Rights Across America rally stood with empty holsters because the DPS prevented them from carrying.

“This is so unreal,” one activist said about the situation.

The Texas state coordinator for Gun Rights Across America, Tammy Koontz, emphasized that her problem was entirely with the DPS’s hypocrisy, not with the Descendants of Confederate Veterans.

“The problem is that we’ve been trying for three months to get black powder firearms here just for this rally for open carry,” she said in an exclusive interview with Infowars. “We open carried at this rally last year and yet they told us that we couldn’t carry this year.”

“We had Come and Take It Austin [another gun rights group] presenting a black powder pistol [as a raffle prize] for this event and they’ve been speaking with them on a daily basis and were told that they could not bring it into the capitol grounds because it was an explosive device.”

“We’re not allowed to do that but they [Descendants of Confederate Veterans] are,” she added. “Now granted, they’ve been doing this for a long time, but it’s BS that the DPS makes its own rules.”

A state trooper confirmed that every year on Jan. 19, the Descendants of Confederate Veterans fire their rifles outside the capitol.

“This is Confederate Heroes’ Day and Robert E. Lee’s birthday, so they get permission from the State Preservation Board to do this little ceremony every year,” he said.

So despite its claims about “explosive devices,” it appears that the DPS doesn’t actually have a problem with black powder firearms being on the capitol grounds as long they’re not carried by those making a stand for the Second Amendment.