[M]aybe, as Waco Convention Center Director Liz Taylor suggests, things just happen.
I met Taylor during the Branch Davidian siege, when it was her task to convince the world that Waco wasn’t what it appeared to be. “I have learned to take things in stride,” she told me this week [after the biker shootout]. “It is all part of a growing community.“
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Higher Ed, Texas-Style
Governor Abbott has promised to sign open carry. He also has endorsed another gun lobby priority — legislation to permit concealed handguns on the state’s college campuses. That bill has drawn alarm from university officials, including Chancellor William McRaven of the University of Texas system who posed a dilemma about gun rights and free speech: “If you’re in a heated debate with somebody in the middle of a classroom, and you don’t know whether or not that individual is carrying, how does that inhibit the interaction between students and faculty?”
Oh please. Ask me a hard one. Once everybody’s packing, everybody knows everybody’s packing. Heated disagreements are resolved exactly the way the two sides of the Bandidos vs. Cossacks debate resolved them.
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A bar is one of the very few places in Texas where you cannot openly carry a weapon — one of the few where you can’t carry an assault rifle, for that matter — but no one seems to have doubted that the [Waco] bikers would have easy access to serious firearms. This is a state where a request by Chipotle that people not display guns while ordering burritos caused a public protest.