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“You must like the taste of boot leather. I don’t, though.”

I don’t know what you mean by that.

A cop can’t tell immediately if a gun is real if a man is approaching him with what appears to be a real weapon in a holster which is illegal to carry open carry in Texas. If the cop doesn’t respond as though it is a real weapon, the cop could end up dead. I do not blame the cop for arresting the man until it was sorted out and I don’t know if the man resisted arrest or what actually happened but the man with the fake gun in the holster was asking to be arrested.

If this open carry group wants a law to approve open carry, do what the rest of us have to do - write the law and give it to a state senator in favor of that, to introduce the bill to the legislature. If you live in Texas, every time you vote, your vote goes to your courthouse to central counting on election night to be counted. Your vote is counted by the people working in central counting and they are chosen according to a law my husband wrote and State Senator Nichols introduced the bill and it passed both houses without a dissenting vote. Every county has to follow the law he wrote and he didn’t run around Texas getting arrested at every courthouse.

Running around the state with fake guns in order to get arrested is totally stupid and this is not their first time to do this.

There’s a big difference between a cop happening upon a lone person on a dimly-lit street who has a pistol in a holster, and a cop accosting a member of a large crowd gathered for the explicit purpose of advocating for open-carry, who has a holstered pistol. In the latter situation, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the person is suddenly going to draw and open fire on the cop, and plenty of opportunity for the cop to request verification that the firearm in question is permitted i.e. “excuse me, sir, I need to ask you about the pistol you’re carrying” “officer, this is a black-powder revolver, and is explicitly excluded from the open-carry prohibition” “thank you, go about your business”. The people carrying those revolvers didn’t approach the cops; the cops pulled them aside and arrested them. Ignorance of the law is no excuse for private citizens; it should also be no excuse for those whose job is to enforce said laws.