Guns, Governance, and Texan Identity

In this episode, we'll talk with Brennan Rivas, PhD, for a deep dive into the complex tapestry of Texas gun regulation. Our conversation navigates the shifting sands of the right to bear arms and delivers a fresh perspective on how Texans—from cowboys to lawmakers—have grappled with the balance of freedom and control when it comes to firearms in public life. She examines the historical context of Texas gun laws against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction, dismantling the myths that they served racial bias and instead, spotlighting their role in fostering a society of decorum. 

Episode Transcript

Scott Sosebee (00:00):
This podcast is not sponsored by does not
reflect the views of theinstitutions that employ us.
It is solely our thoughts andideas, based upon our
professional training and studyof the past.

Gene Preuss (00:13):
Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that
explores Texas history beforeand beyond the Alamo.
Not only will we talk Texashistory, we'll visit with folks
who teach it, write it, supportit, and with some who've made it
and, of course, all of us wholive it and love it.
Welcome to another edition ofTalking Texas History.

(00:36):
I'm Gene Price.

Scott Sosebee (00:37):
I'm Scott Selsby.
Gene, we've had a lot of peopleon for a lot of time and we're
in Texas and we're talking aboutTexas history, and how have we
never had anybody on to talkabout guts?

Gene Preuss (00:48):
How did that happen ?
Isn't it part of the Texasmystique?

Scott Sosebee (00:52):
That's what I've been told, so we better find out
more about it then.
So why don't you introduce ourguest?

Gene Preuss (00:57):
Well, we have Brennan Rivas, and Brennan, tell
us a little bit about yourself.

Brennan Rivas (01:06):
Hi Gene and Scott , I'm glad to be here.
I am an in-grafted Texan, notborn here but arrived at age six
, and I spent most of myadulthood in the Dallas-Fort
Worth area.
I studied history as anundergraduate and I have a PhD

(01:27):
in history from TCU, and I'vebeen studying guns and gun
regulation for about seven oreight years now.

Scott Sosebee (01:36):
That's great.
It's a topic that I'm bettingthere's not just a whole lot of
people that study that.
They probably should All of us.
What we've been told about youis you like the Gilded Nation
Progressive in the Bay of Texas.
That's a great topic anyway,but especially these.
What you're real specialty isare laws about weapons not

(01:56):
necessarily weapons, but lawsabout weapons.
So tell us what drew you tothat topic.

Brennan Rivas (02:02):
Yeah, you make a great point that there's not a
whole lot of us who study thehistory of gun laws.
The running joke by one of theothers there's a handful of us.
His joke is that we could havea conference inside an English
phone booth.
That's a pretty small group.
I fell into this topic byaccident.

(02:23):
I did not grow up interested inguns or aware of, you know, gun
control controversy.
I really approached this as agraduate student who was
shopping around for adissertation topic.
This was maybe about 2015.
And at that time, the statelegislature was considering

(02:44):
modifying some of our gun laws.
At that time, the one underdiscussion which ended up
happening was to allow peoplewith handgun licenses to carry
openly as well as concealed.
And so ahead of in the middleof all this discussion about it
and ahead of the legislativesession, the Houston Chronicle

(03:05):
ran an article about it and theyhad interviewed the expert on
the history of gun regulation inTexas and my advisor and I were
talking about it and he saidwell, you know you're signed up
for a research seminar with menext semester.
Why don't you dig into some ofthe historical claims and see

(03:29):
what, see whether or not they'retrue?
And so that's what I did and Iended up with a really good
seminar paper.
I got an A, but also I ended upsubmitting that to the
quarterly and that became myarticle in the Southwestern
Historical Quarterly.
I had previously studiedantitrust laws that's what my

(03:49):
master's thesis was on and Ithought that guns and weapons
would be more exciting.
I thought it might be betterfor me on the job market, but I
also thought it would be a topicwhere I could engage a little
more meaningfully with race andgender.
You know things that I hadstudied and learned about in
graduate school that I didn'treally know how to apply those,

(04:12):
those methodologies to studyingantitrust.
So I thought I could.
I thought I could do more withthe topic, and so I've just
taken it and ran with it.

Gene Preuss (04:20):
Talking about that article that you put in the
quarterly.
It's called "An unequal rightto bear arms, state weapons laws
and white supremacy in Texas1836 to 1900.
What has been the Texaslawmakers attitudes towards
carrying weapons in publics?
What did you learn?

Brennan Rivas (04:42):
Well, I learned that for most of our state's
history most Texans havesupported the idea of regulating
the presence of guns in publicin one shape or another.
Early on there wasn't a state,what we call public carry law, a
law that regulated orprohibited the carrying of

(05:05):
weapons in public.
And actually in the antebellum19th century Texas lawmakers
kind of divided over whether ornot they thought the right to
bear arms would be violated bysuch a regulation.
There was a bit of a back andforth in the 1845 Constitutional
Convention between REB Baylor,who was against the

(05:29):
constitutionality of gunregulation, and John Hemphill,
who said that the right to beararms has nothing to do with
police regulations affecting thecarrying or wearing of weapons
in public.
So we have a bit of a back andforth between them in 1845.
But it was actually the statejudiciary that made it very
clear that even if thelegislature were to pass any

(05:52):
sort of public carry law thatthe judiciary was going to
strike it down.
Now all of that changed as aresult of the Civil War and
Reconstruction.
The Civil War and Reconstructionwere a tremendous turning point
in American history in so manyways, but certainly in the
history of guns and weaponregulation In Texas.

(06:13):
The lawlessness, violence,instability of government, those
are the things that droveTexans white or black,
conservative or Democrat versusRepublican those are the things
that drove Texans to supportsome kind of gun regulation, and
in fact, even though it wasRepublicans who were yes, the

(06:37):
hated Republicans are the onesthat enacted this, but it was
actually a bipartisan consensusthat something needed to be done
about guns.
Governor Throckmorton'sadministration had floated the
idea of taxing carrying weaponsin public, but in a cash poor
society, his party couldn'tagree on what that tax would

(06:59):
look like and so they didn't putforward a law at all.
But when the Republicans tookover control, they thought that
the only way to have a safe andprotected public sphere was for
no one to have guns.
So, like I said, thelawlessness and instability is
what drove people in bothparties and various different

(07:21):
political camps to support doingsomething about gun carrying.
And in fact, when Texas didfinally get into regulating guns
, a little behind the curve forvarious other southern
slaveholding states, texas waspretty aggressive about it.
So whereas states likeMississippi, louisiana, alabama,

(07:43):
I think, georgia, various othersouthern slaveholding states,
had enacted concealed carryrestrictions in the antebellum
period, but Texas hadn't enactedanything for the reasons I
described a minute ago.
But the Texas law from 1871 notonly prohibited carrying

(08:04):
concealed but it alsospecifically prohibited carrying
openly, which was a really bigdeal.
So, texas, when they got intoit they were pretty progressive
about it.
But even at a larger scale,beyond just Texas, the Civil War
and Reconstruction were thistremendous turning point in the
history of guns and gunregulation.

(08:26):
Because of the mobilization forthe Civil War and in fact
Winchester started out with theHenry Rifle and it was use in
the Civil War that made Henry'swell known and popular.
It was government contractsthat initially kept that company
afloat.
The same thing happened withColts.

(08:47):
Samuel Colts' first businesswent under.
His second business was savedby a government contract during
the 1840s but he lost his patentin 1857.
And if it hadn't been for thesemassive US military contracts
during the Civil War, hiscompany would not have been so
successful and his patentexpired on the eve of the Civil

(09:11):
War.
So all of these other companieslike Smith and Wesson who had
been waiting in the wings to getinto revolver production, they
all got government contracts aswell.
So anyway, that mobilizationmeant that there were a whole
lot more guns in circulation.
These companies had invested intremendous production capacity
for firearms, and when the warwas over, who's going to buy

(09:33):
those guns when the US militaryhas cut their purchasing?
They started marketing them andselling them to Americans
nationwide, and so there waseasier access to guns and, as a
result of that, nationally a bigpush for greater regulation of
guns.

Scott Sosebee (09:51):
Let me show you if you look at your article that
you've written in, which is avery, very good that came out in
2018 Quarterly and the premiseof it in talking race had a lot
to do with how we looked at gunlaws and how gun laws going to
be regulated, not being a, itkind of changed the tune.
So why don't you tell us abouthow race came into gun laws?

Brennan Rivas (10:15):
Yeah, this is a really important topic.
A lot of the people whoresearch gun regulations are
doing so because of thelandscape of Second Amendment
jurisprudence today, kind of thegun control versus gun rights
debate, and in that debatethere's been a lot of discussion

(10:36):
about intellectual history andwhat the Second Amendment meant,
and there's a lot of talk aboutlaws and there are these clean
statutes that get pulled outfrom the context in which they
were enacted, separated from thesocial problems that they were
designed to address, and thatreally takes it, takes the

(10:58):
history out of it right, justpulling the laws out from their
context and that's one thingthat I've been very passionate
about and that I think is beingcorrected among the people who
are studying gun regulation isto take the question of race
more seriously and start lookingmore critically at you know,

(11:20):
which laws might have beeninspired by racism?
Or how do we even evaluatewhether or not a law was or was
not racist?
What is the metric by which wecould even we could even
ascertain that right?
And so I have found that raceis not the motivating factor in
gun regulation.
In fact, I found compellingevidence that Texas gun laws

(11:44):
were not enacted with racist,racist intentions of forethought
.
So race isn't the whole story,but it is an important part of
the story and one that shouldn'tbe shortchanged.
So Texas, as the Republic ofTexas, in 1840 enacted a slave
code which remained effective.

(12:05):
Coming into the United States,the slave code prohibited
enslaved persons from carryingor having weapons unless they
had the permission of a masteror overseer or authorized white
person.
That was very normal.
I just about every slave codehas some sort of you know gun or

(12:29):
weapon platform, but there wassome back and forth about
whether or not that was strictenough.
So there was some discussion,and I think there might have
even been a temporary changethat made that a little stricter
and trying to prohibit slaveowners from providing arms to

(12:52):
their slaves at all.
Now, that really wasn'tfeasible, because slaves did
have access to guns at times,based on what their
responsibilities were and thelevel of trust that they had
within the household and thingslike that.
So there's certainly slave coderestrictions in the United
States, and definitely in Texas.
Other states, though, statesthat had larger free black

(13:14):
populations, they were morelikely to have licensing laws.
So there were also some statesthat required free blacks to
undergo some sort of licensingprocess in order to legally
possess a firearm within theirhome.
North Carolina did that, Ithink Delaware did that.
Texas did not.
My thinking on that, though, isthat the free black population

(13:37):
was not very large in Texas, andso there wasn't a whole lot of
concern the way that there wasin places like North Carolina.
The laws that I've spent moretime working on, which are these
public carry or sensitive placerestrictions, so in Texas,
those were enacted in the 1870sby Republicans.
Those, though, were not enactedwith racist intentions, and, in

(14:01):
fact, the concealed carryrestrictions nationally do not
appear to have been enacted withracist intentions of
forethought.
So, for instance, a state likeLouisiana enacted a concealed
carry restriction in 1812 thatwithstood any sort of
constitutional challenge.
It remained on the booksthroughout the 19th century.

(14:25):
Well, from what I as far as Iknow, louisiana also had a slave
code, so if that law wasdesigned to be only applied to
black people, whether they befree or enslaved, it doesn't
make sense that it would havebeen enacted the way that it was
, as opposed to be enacted aspart of a slave code or as part
of some regulation of freeblacks.

(14:47):
In fact, that law was designedto be enforced against white
people who were notoriously andinappropriately carrying weapons
in public at all times, and soin Texas, the in Texas, some of
the claims that had been madethat I investigated for my
article was a claim that theselaws were enacted with racist

(15:09):
intentions, and investigatingthat, I found that was not true.
That a bi-racial Republicanparty supported this legislation
because they understood that ifeveryone were carrying a gun,
that they would be outgunned allthe time.
Because the Texas Republicanparty did not have a demographic

(15:29):
majority in the state.
They represented a minority ofpeople, and if everyone were to
be armed, they were the ones whowere going to suffer, and so
they saw a disarmed publicsphere as the only way to have a
polite, law-abiding, safesociety.
They did not adhere to themantra more guns, less crime

(15:50):
that you hear sometimes today.

Gene Preuss (15:52):
Well, let me ask you about something you an
incident you wrote about in yourarticle, and that was when
state police officer MitchCotton tried to arrest Mr DC
Applewhite, and so that thatthat's an incident where and I'm

(16:14):
going to let you explain moreof it to the audience that's an
incident where race but also thequestion of Republican control
kind of intermingled.
So let me let you talk a littlebit about that.

Brennan Rivas (16:30):
Yeah, that happened in Limestone County.
I found a lot of testimony inthe legislative journals.
There was an investigation ofit.
There's a lot of evidence aboutwhat happened.
We've got a lot of wonderfulsources to try and recreate what
happened.

(16:52):
Mitch Cotton was a black man anda state police officer.
The state police was veryunpopular among most white
Texans.
It was reviled as an all blackforce, the hounds of the
governor.
There's some great scholarshipbusting that myth, but they were

(17:16):
generally reviled by Democratsor Democratic-leaning Texans.
Anyway, this incident occurredafter the public carry law had
been enacted.
It's illegal to carry, openlyor concealed, a pistol in public
in Texas.
There was a man in a bar or neara bar named Applewhite.
He was carrying a gununlawfully.

(17:39):
This state police officer triedto enforce the law and arrest
him.
The whole thing resulted in ashootout.
Applewhite was killed in thestreet Out of fear of the white
reprisal that was going to comeafter him.
Mitch Cotton and the otherstate police officers who were

(17:59):
with him, who were also black.
They ran away.
It led to a racist clash withinthe city.
There were numerous black menwho had to flee the city for
their own safety.
Conveniently, all of thishappened right ahead of an
election.
As this disruption washappening in Limestone County, a

(18:25):
white militia which was not,from what I understand it, may
have been a state authorizedmilitia, but it was a white
militia company they mobilizedand they essentially took over
the town.
They did so in order to, asthey claimed, protect the
integrity of the election, butthey had also driven all the
black voters out of town.

(18:46):
They were guarding the pollingplaces with guns, inviting the
black men to come and cast theirvotes.
This was a turning point forLimestone County during the
reconstruction process ofDemocrats retaking control.

Scott Sosebee (19:04):
It's a fascinating thing when you think
and talk about present-dayideas about regulation of guns,
many of them look back and citethe carrying of weapons and the
proliferation of guns in the19th century.
What they're really seeing, aswe all know, is a popular

(19:27):
culture mythic manifestation ofthe Wild West.
It was actually very different.
When you do this your researchhas found that out you, along
with others, have exposed thismyth of the Wild West, the
gun-toting West and all thesethings.
How do you find people reactwhen you present your research?

(19:50):
When you talk about gunregulation?
How do contemporary peoplereact to what you have found?

Brennan Rivas (19:58):
Often people are surprised.
There's different audiences Ishare this with.
If I meet real people,non-academic folks, they might
be surprised that Texas had gunregulations like this in the
1800s at all.
That's always fun to talk aboutAmong historians, though

(20:20):
they're more likely to think, ohwell, yeah, I guess now that I
think about it, it would bereasonable that there might be
historical gun laws.
What they're more likely tofind surprising is that Texas
was such a champion of what wasat the time very cutting edge
and strict gun regulation byprohibiting not only concealed
carry but also open carry.

(20:41):
When I get more into the policydetails, historians even find it
surprising that Texas was sucha champion of it.
Also, people do find surprisingthat a lot of these laws were
not enacted with racistintentions.
Just to add one more thingabout the previous topic of the

(21:02):
discussion about race and gunregulation I found that the laws
weren't inspired by racism.
I've even got stats showingthat initially they were not
even enforced in an overtlyracist way, but that did develop
over time.
Another thing that peoplesometimes find surprising is
that these laws were not enactedwith racist intentions, even

(21:24):
though they did later on becomequite clearly and obviously
enforced in a grosslydiscriminatory way.
People find it surprising andthat makes it a little more fun
to share with folks.

Gene Preuss (21:37):
So let me ask you a question that I'm sure that
some people are thinking.
Here you are, you're a woman,you're an academic.
What do you know about guns?
Have you had any problems anypeople reacting to you because
you're a woman, an academic.

(21:59):
So how do they react to yourpublishing or talking about gun
laws?

Brennan Rivas (22:05):
Yeah, I was initially really concerned that
I might get hate mail or, youknow, feel threatened or
something, and I considered notdoing this topic for that reason
.
The Michael Belial scandal youknow that that's a real yeah,
having somebody you know combthrough your footnotes and try

(22:26):
to discredit your scholarship,you know.
So that has encouraged me to bevery thorough and careful and
honest, right.
But yeah, I haven't receivedanywhere near as much pushback
as I might have thought.
I think for the most part I'vekind of flown under the radar
and most people don't know orcare.
I have had a couple of timeswhere gun experts or gun

(22:48):
enthusiasts have argued with meor at times tried to correct me.
I have found that I've had tolearn a lot about guns and I'm
not really into guns.
But I did reach a point where Ithought, if I'm going to be
doing this, I need to know moreabout guns and I need to

(23:09):
understand what gun rightsadvocates are talking about.
There's certain phrases thatyou just don't want to say
unless you're prepared to argue,like saying the phrase assault
weapon.
You have to be very carefulusing that phrase in the
sentence because you will beconfronted about it, right.
So I have had to brush up onguns and I have gone to this.

(23:36):
It's like a shooting range forreplica antique guns.
They aren't actually antiquesbut they're replicas.
So I've shot in 1892 Winchesterlever action, you know, and so
I've definitely learned a wholelot about the technology part
and the differences between andamong different kinds of

(23:58):
firearms and kind of thetechnological development and
the sort of the history oftechnology involving firearms
during the 19th and early 20thcenturies.

Scott Sosebee (24:10):
Your research, specifically, is 1836 to 1900
and you do the 19th century ongun laws and things like this.
You have the idea of thelightning, but you have ideas
and because you've researchedthis about how the ideas have
changed, Can you pinpoint whenthe idea?
I mean, if you look at theresearch and you look at the

(24:30):
history, most states were opento regulating the carrying of
weapons in public in the 19thcentury and into the 20th
century.
But in many states now that hasalmost completely reversed and
we were getting this idea.
We're not going to regulatethem at all.
When did that change?
What caused it and this is youas as an academic what caused it

(24:53):
and when did it change and why?

Brennan Rivas (24:56):
I'd say there's two phases in this change.
The first one is in the 1930sor so.
This is when the NRA startedgetting involved a little more,
a little more actively in tryingto shape gun gun regulation.
Initially the NRA and the Ithink there was like a pistol

(25:19):
association to the NationalPistol Association and Pistol
and Revolver Association.
But these interest groups,their hope was to get uniform
laws so that way and they wouldpromote model legislation.
But their activity and theirengagement, especially with

(25:43):
hunting enthusiasts andsportsmen's groups and hunting
outdoors, sporting magazines,that seems to have been a sea
change in the 1930s or so interms of developing a
consciousness to some extentamong gun owners that these laws

(26:04):
were at times harming them andtrying to go after criminals.
They're hurting us, they'recriminalizing lawful activity.
So the dynamic or the discoursefor that was really shaped in
the 1930s.
There's a great book written bya friend of mine named Patrick
Charles.
It's called Vote Gun and he hasdone a lot of research on this.

(26:26):
So any of your listenersinterested in following up would
do well to check out that book.
But then later on there was anacceleration of this in the
1970s and later, and that wasaround the time that the NRA
became yet more active in tryingto shape legislation as more of

(26:46):
a lobby group and the currentgun control, gun rights debate
that we have right now wasreally created as a result of
that.
And so, beginning in the 70sand 80s, there were certain law
scholars who started pushingthis in legal circles and they
were really capitalizing on theculture, wars and kind of the

(27:07):
conservative backlash of the 70sand 80s, trying to paint
historical gun regulations as anintrusive government imposition
or a relic of racism that weneed to get rid of and that has
ushered in this new era.
And because originalism as amode of interpreting the
Constitution was really risingto prominence at that time and

(27:31):
becoming a more legitimate wayof looking at constitutional
history.
They invoked a lot of historyand there was a telling of
American history, including atelling of Texas history or
history about guns and gunregulation that was not accurate
and I think that went a longway toward, in combination with

(27:55):
kind of, the romanticization ofthe wild west.
You know, people's vision ofwhat our heritage really is.
That vision was informed byinaccurate scholarship and so
people have misremembered whatthe American tradition of
regulating guns really is.
So it's definitely a 20thcentury development and this

(28:19):
kind of gun rights activism thatwe see.
It's developed over time.
There wasn't a one single sparkthat created it.
It's been a long time comingand that's why it's so strong.

Scott Sosebee (28:32):
Do you think that we will see a reversal of that
anytime soon?
Go back to some other ideasabout regulation, or have we
crossed a line that we may notget back from?

Brennan Rivas (28:45):
Well, you know, that's really hard to answer.
I don't think there's a quickfix, because we're talking about
something that affects the waypeople feel and, for a lot of
folks, has become a part of howthey see themselves.
It's a part of one's ownidentity.
For some people they're theguns they own, or what those

(29:06):
guns mean for them.
So I don't see that kind ofthing changing.
But I do see that if we keepmoving in the direction of
rolling back regulations andthere's an obvious increase in
shootings and crime as aconsequence, I do think that a

(29:26):
lot of more moderate people aregonna be willing to speak up and
I do think that we might seesome policy changes.
Even if we don't see, you know,cultural or ideological changes
that are major, I think wemight see some policy
compromises.

Scott Sosebee (29:42):
Brendan, we're reaching towards the end of our
time.
Next time it's always a minutefor everybody we have.
This has been a great, greatdiscussion and I really
appreciate you being on here.
We ask all of our guests theycome here as a final question.
Brendan Reavits, what do youknow?

Brennan Rivas (29:58):
Well, this is a great question.
I'm gonna stick on the theme ofwhy you brought me on, which is
the history of gun regulation.
Also, what I know is and Ididn't invent this, okay the
United States has a gun culture.
We've also got a gun controlculture.

Scott Sosebee (30:20):
I like it.
I like that.
That's short and sweet.

Gene Preuss (30:22):
Short and sweet.

Scott Sosebee (30:24):
Yeah, I like that .

Gene Preuss (30:26):
Hey, brendan, I wanna thank you very much for
being on the program.
I thought it was greatinformation and some new ideas
on perspectives that arehistorical, but we really don't
cover very much in our Texashistory courses, so I really
appreciate your answer, Thankyou.

Scott Sosebee (30:41):
thank you very much.
This has been one of our betterones.

Brennan Rivas (30:44):
Oh well, thanks.
I'm very glad to haveparticipated.
I'd love to do it againsometime.
All right, thanks so much.
Yeah, thank you Bye.