Here's where the myth breaks hard from the history: frontier Texas had serious gun control. The cattle towns of the Texas frontier — Abilene, Dodge City (technically Kansas, but the endpoint of Texas drives), and the Texas trail-head towns — routinely required cowboys to check their firearms upon entering town.

Every time someone at the LGS counter tells me "they never had gun laws back then," I think about Abilene in 1871. Wild Bill Hickok enforcing a carry ban is not exactly the image people have in mind when they romanticize the frontier. The practical logic was sound — trail-worn cowboys with back pay and access to whiskey is not a combination that benefits from everyone staying strapped.

The permissive framework you see today is largely a product of the last thirty years. Getting from there to here is the actual story.

This is the part that reframes everything else. Texas constitutional carry passed in 2021, which feels like a long time coming if you grew up hearing the mythology — but the timeline here shows it's actually the outlier, not the baseline. A Texan carrying a handgun in 1960 was committing a crime regardless of how many acres their family had worked for generations.

Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers actually collaborated with Colt on the design of the Colt Walker in 1847 — a .44 caliber horse pistol heavy enough to bludgeon someone if you ran out of ammunition.

That last line is doing a lot of work. If you've ever held a Colt Walker reproduction, you understand immediately — it's not a firearm so much as a small artillery piece that happens to fit in a holster. The Walker was designed by someone who had actually been in a fight and needed the gun to keep working even after the powder ran out.

The UT Tower section getting cut off is frustrating because that's where the modern carry debate in Texas really starts to take shape — the 1966 shooting is one of the few cases where armed civilians actually did provide meaningful suppressing fire during an active shooter event, and it fed directly into arguments that have been running in Austin ever since.

For those of you who've shot in Texas or carry there — how much of this history did you actually know before reading something like this, and did any of it change how you think about the constitutional carry debate that's been spreading to other states?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team