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.
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.
This podcast is not sponsored by does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Gene Preuss:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Price.
Scott Sosebee:I'm Scott Selsby. Gene, we've had a lot of people on for a lot of time and we're in Texas and we're talking about Texas history, and how have we never had anybody on to talk about guts?
Gene Preuss:How did that happen? Isn't it part of the Texas mystique?
Scott Sosebee:That's what I've been told, so we better find out more about it then. So why don't you introduce our guest?
Gene Preuss:Well, we have Brennan Rivas, and Brennan, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Brennan Rivas:Hi Gene and Scott, I'm glad to be here. I am an in-grafted Texan, not born here but arrived at age six, and I spent most of my adulthood in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I studied history as an undergraduate and I have a PhD in history from TCU, and I've been studying guns and gun regulation for about seven or eight years now.
Scott Sosebee:That's great. It's a topic that I'm betting there's not just a whole lot of people that study that. They probably should All of us. What we've been told about you is 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 is are laws about weapons not necessarily weapons, but laws about weapons. So tell us what drew you to that topic.
Brennan Rivas:Yeah, you make a great point that there's not a whole lot of us who study the history of gun laws. The running joke by one of the others there's a handful of us. His joke is that we could have a conference inside an English phone booth. That's a pretty small group.
Brennan Rivas:I fell into this topic by accident. I did not grow up interested in guns or aware of, you know, gun control controversy. I really approached this as a graduate student who was shopping around for a dissertation topic. This was maybe about 2015. And at that time, the state legislature was considering modifying some of our gun laws. At that time, the one under discussion which ended up happening was to allow people with handgun licenses to carry openly as well as concealed. And so ahead of in the middle of all this discussion about it and ahead of the legislative session, the Houston Chronicle ran an article about it and they had interviewed the expert on the history of gun regulation in Texas and my advisor and I were talking about it and he said well, you know you're signed up for a research seminar with me next semester. Why don't you dig into some of the historical claims and see what, see whether or not they're true? And so that's what I did and I ended up with a really good seminar paper. I got an A, but also I ended up submitting that to the quarterly and that became my article in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
Brennan Rivas:I had previously studied antitrust laws that's what my master's thesis was on and I thought that guns and weapons would be more exciting. I thought it might be better for me on the job market, but I also thought it would be a topic where I could engage a little more meaningfully with race and gender. You know things that I had studied and learned about in graduate school that I didn't really know how to apply those, those methodologies to studying antitrust. So I thought I could. I thought I could do more with the topic, and so I've just taken it and ran with it.
Gene Preuss:Talking about that article that you put in the quarterly. It's called "An unequal right to bear arms, state weapons laws and white supremacy in Texas 1836 to 1900. What has been the Texas lawmakers attitudes towards carrying weapons in publics? What did you learn?
Brennan Rivas:Well, I learned that for most of our state's history most Texans have supported the idea of regulating the presence of guns in public in one shape or another. Early on there wasn't a state, what we call public carry law, a law that regulated or prohibited the carrying of weapons in public. And actually in the antebellum 19th century Texas lawmakers kind of divided over whether or not they thought the right to bear arms would be violated by such a regulation. There was a bit of a back and forth in the 1845 Constitutional Convention between REB Baylor, who was against the constitutionality of gun regulation, and John Hemphill, who said that the right to bear arms has nothing to do with police regulations affecting the carrying or wearing of weapons in public. So we have a bit of a back and forth between them in 1845. But it was actually the state judiciary that made it very clear that even if the legislature were to pass any sort of public carry law that the judiciary was going to strike it down. Now all of that changed as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Brennan Rivas:The Civil War and Reconstruction were a tremendous turning point in American history in so many ways, but certainly in the history of guns and weapon regulation In Texas. The lawlessness, violence, instability of government, those are the things that drove Texans white or black, conservative or Democrat versus Republican those are the things that drove Texans to support some kind of gun regulation, and in fact, even though it was Republicans who were yes, the hated Republicans are the ones that enacted this, but it was actually a bipartisan consensus that something needed to be done about guns. Governor Throckmorton's administration had floated the idea of taxing carrying weapons in public, but in a cash poor society, his party couldn't agree on what that tax would look like and so they didn't put forward a law at all. But when the Republicans took over control, they thought that the only way to have a safe and protected public sphere was for no one to have guns. So, like I said, the lawlessness and instability is what drove people in both parties and various different political camps to support doing something about gun carrying. And in fact, when Texas did finally get into regulating guns, a little behind the curve for various other southern slaveholding states, texas was pretty aggressive about it. So whereas states like Mississippi, louisiana, alabama, I think, georgia, various other southern slaveholding states, had enacted concealed carry restrictions in the antebellum period, but Texas hadn't enacted anything for the reasons I described a minute ago. But the Texas law from 1871 not only prohibited carrying concealed but it also specifically prohibited carrying openly, which was a really big deal. So, texas, when they got into it they were pretty progressive about it. But even at a larger scale, beyond just Texas, the Civil War and Reconstruction were this tremendous turning point in the history of guns and gun regulation.
Brennan Rivas:Because of the mobilization for the Civil War and in fact Winchester started out with the Henry Rifle and it was use in the Civil War that made Henry's well known and popular. It was government contracts that initially kept that company afloat. The same thing happened with Colts. Samuel Colts' first business went under. His second business was saved by a government contract during the 1840s but he lost his patent in 1857.
Brennan Rivas:And if it hadn't been for these massive US military contracts during the Civil War, his company would not have been so successful and his patent expired on the eve of the Civil War. So all of these other companies like Smith and Wesson who had been waiting in the wings to get into revolver production, they all got government contracts as well. So anyway, that mobilization meant that there were a whole lot more guns in circulation. These companies had invested in tremendous production capacity for firearms, and when the war was over, who's going to buy those guns when the US military has cut their purchasing? They started marketing them and selling them to Americans nationwide, and so there was easier access to guns and, as a result of that, nationally a big push for greater regulation of guns.
Scott Sosebee:Let me show you if you look at your article that you've written in, which is a very, very good that came out in 2018 Quarterly and the premise of it in talking race had a lot to do with how we looked at gun laws and how gun laws going to be regulated, not being a, it kind of changed the tune. So why don't you tell us about how race came into gun laws?
Brennan Rivas:Yeah, this is a really important topic. A lot of the people who research gun regulations are doing so because of the landscape of Second Amendment jurisprudence today, kind of the gun control versus gun rights debate, and in that debate there's been a lot of discussion about intellectual history and what the Second Amendment meant, and there's a lot of talk about laws and there are these clean statutes that get pulled out from the context in which they were enacted, separated from the social problems that they were designed to address, and that really takes it, takes the history out of it right, just pulling the laws out from their context and that's one thing that I've been very passionate about and that I think is being corrected among the people who are studying gun regulation is to take the question of race more seriously and start looking more critically at you know, which laws might have been inspired by racism? Or how do we even evaluate whether or not a law was or was not racist? What is the metric by which we could even we could even ascertain that right? And so I have found that race is not the motivating factor in gun regulation. In fact, I found compelling evidence that Texas gun laws 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't be shortchanged.
Brennan Rivas:So Texas, as the Republic of Texas, in 1840 enacted a slave code which remained effective. Coming into the United States, the slave code prohibited enslaved persons from carrying or having weapons unless they had the permission of a master or overseer or authorized white person. That was very normal. I just about every slave code has some sort of you know gun or weapon platform, but there was some back and forth about whether or not that was strict enough. So there was some discussion, and I think there might have even been a temporary change that made that a little stricter and trying to prohibit slave owners from providing arms to their slaves at all. Now, that really wasn't feasible, because slaves did have access to guns at times, based on what their responsibilities were and the level of trust that they had within the household and things like that. So there's certainly slave code restrictions in the United States, and definitely in Texas. Other states, though, states that had larger free black populations, they were more likely to have licensing laws. So there were also some states that required free blacks to undergo some sort of licensing process in order to legally possess a firearm within their home. North Carolina did that, I think Delaware did that. Texas did not. My thinking on that, though, is that the free black population was not very large in Texas, and so there wasn't a whole lot of concern the way that there was in places like North Carolina.
Brennan Rivas:The laws that I've spent more time working on, which are these public carry or sensitive place restrictions, so in Texas, those were enacted in the 1870s by Republicans. Those, though, were not enacted with racist intentions, and, in fact, the concealed carry restrictions nationally do not appear to have been enacted with racist intentions of forethought. So, for instance, a state like Louisiana enacted a concealed carry restriction in 1812 that withstood any sort of constitutional challenge. It remained on the books throughout the 19th century. Well, from what I as far as I know, louisiana also had a slave code, so if that law was designed to be only applied to black people, whether they be free or enslaved, it doesn't make sense that it would have been enacted the way that it was, as opposed to be enacted as part of a slave code or as part of some regulation of free blacks.
Brennan Rivas:In fact, that law was designed to be enforced against white people who were notoriously and inappropriately carrying weapons in public at all times, and so in Texas, the in Texas, some of the claims that had been made that I investigated for my article was a claim that these laws were enacted with racist intentions, and investigating that, I found that was not true. That a bi-racial Republican party supported this legislation because they understood that if everyone were carrying a gun, that they would be outgunned all the time. Because the Texas Republican party did not have a demographic majority in the state. They represented a minority of people, and if everyone were to be armed, they were the ones who were going to suffer, and so they saw a disarmed public sphere as the only way to have a polite, law-abiding, safe society. They did not adhere to the mantra more guns, less crime that you hear sometimes today.
Gene Preuss:Well, let me ask you about something you an incident you wrote about in your article, and that was when state police officer Mitch Cotton tried to arrest Mr DC Applewhite, and so that that that's an incident where and I'm going to let you explain more of it to the audience that's an incident where race but also the question of Republican control kind of intermingled. So let me let you talk a little bit about that.
Brennan Rivas:Yeah, that happened in Limestone County. I found a lot of testimony in the legislative journals. There was an investigation of it. There's a lot of evidence about what happened. We've got a lot of wonderful sources to try and recreate what happened.
Brennan Rivas:Mitch Cotton was a black man and a state police officer. The state police was very unpopular among most white Texans. It was reviled as an all black force, the hounds of the governor. There's some great scholarship busting that myth, but they were generally reviled by Democrats or Democratic-leaning Texans. Anyway, this incident occurred after the public carry law had been enacted. It's illegal to carry, openly or concealed, a pistol in public in Texas.
Brennan Rivas:There was a man in a bar or near a bar named Applewhite. He was carrying a gun unlawfully. This state police officer tried to enforce the law and arrest him. The whole thing resulted in a shootout. Applewhite was killed in the street Out of fear of the white reprisal that was going to come after him. Mitch Cotton and the other state police officers who were with him, who were also black. They ran away.
Brennan Rivas:It led to a racist clash within the city. There were numerous black men who had to flee the city for their own safety. Conveniently, all of this happened right ahead of an election. As this disruption was happening in Limestone County, a white militia which was not, from what I understand it, may have been a state authorized militia, but it was a white militia company they mobilized and they essentially took over the town. They did so in order to, as they claimed, protect the integrity of the election, but they had also driven all the black voters out of town. They were guarding the polling places with guns, inviting the black men to come and cast their votes. This was a turning point for Limestone County during the reconstruction process of Democrats retaking control.
Scott Sosebee:It's a fascinating thing when you think and talk about present-day ideas about regulation of guns, many of them look back and cite the carrying of weapons and the proliferation of guns in the 19th century. What they're really seeing, as we all know, is a popular culture mythic manifestation of the Wild West. It was actually very different. When you do this your research has found that out you, along with others, have exposed this myth of the Wild West, the gun-toting West and all these things. How do you find people react when you present your research? When you talk about gun regulation? How do contemporary people react to what you have found?
Brennan Rivas:Often people are surprised. There's different audiences I share this with. If I meet real people, non-academic folks, they might be surprised that Texas had gun regulations like this in the 1800s at all. That's always fun to talk about Among historians, though they're more likely to think, oh well, yeah, I guess now that I think about it, it would be reasonable that there might be historical gun laws. What they're more likely to find surprising is that Texas was such a champion of what was at the time very cutting edge and strict gun regulation by prohibiting not only concealed carry but also open carry.
Brennan Rivas:When I get more into the policy details, historians even find it surprising that Texas was such a champion of it. Also, people do find surprising that a lot of these laws were not enacted with racist intentions. Just to add one more thing about the previous topic of the discussion about race and gun regulation I found that the laws weren't inspired by racism. I've even got stats showing that initially they were not even enforced in an overtly racist way, but that did develop over time. Another thing that people sometimes find surprising is that these laws were not enacted with racist intentions, even though they did later on become quite clearly and obviously enforced in a grossly discriminatory way. People find it surprising and that makes it a little more fun to share with folks.
Gene Preuss: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 any people reacting to you because you're a woman, an academic. So how do they react to your publishing or talking about gun laws?
Brennan Rivas:Yeah, I was initially really concerned that I might get hate mail or, you know, feel threatened or something, and I considered not doing this topic for that reason. The Michael Belial scandal you know that that's a real yeah, having somebody you know comb through your footnotes and try to discredit your scholarship, you know. So that has encouraged me to be very thorough and careful and honest, right. But yeah, I haven't received anywhere near as much pushback as I might have thought. I think for the most part I've kind of flown under the radar and most people don't know or care. I have had a couple of times where gun experts or gun enthusiasts have argued with me or at times tried to correct me.
Brennan Rivas:I have found that I've had to learn a lot about guns and I'm not really into guns. But I did reach a point where I thought, if I'm going to be doing this, I need to know more about guns and I need to understand what gun rights advocates are talking about. There's certain phrases that you just don't want to say unless you're prepared to argue, like saying the phrase assault weapon. You have to be very careful using that phrase in the sentence because you will be confronted about it, right. So I have had to brush up on guns and I have gone to this. It's like a shooting range for replica antique guns. They aren't actually antiques but they're replicas. So I've shot in 1892 Winchester lever action, you know, and so I've definitely learned a whole lot about the technology part and the differences between and among different kinds of firearms and kind of the technological development and the sort of the history of technology involving firearms during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Scott Sosebee:Your research, specifically, is 1836 to 1900 and you do the 19th century on gun laws and things like this. You have the idea of the lightning, but you have ideas and because you've researched this about how the ideas have changed, Can you pinpoint when the idea? I mean, if you look at the research and you look at the history, most states were open to regulating the carrying of weapons in public in the 19th century and into the 20th century. But in many states now that has almost completely reversed and we were getting this idea. We're not going to regulate them at all. When did that change? What caused it and this is you as as an academic what caused it and when did it change and why?
Brennan Rivas:I'd say there's two phases in this change. The first one is in the 1930s or so. This is when the NRA started getting involved a little more, a little more actively in trying to shape gun gun regulation. Initially the NRA and the I think there was like a pistol association to the National Pistol Association and Pistol and Revolver Association. But these interest groups, their hope was to get uniform laws so that way and they would promote model legislation. But their activity and their engagement, especially with hunting enthusiasts and sportsmen's groups and hunting outdoors, sporting magazines, that seems to have been a sea change in the 1930s or so in terms of developing a consciousness to some extent among gun owners that these laws were at times harming them and trying to go after criminals. They're hurting us, they're criminalizing lawful activity. So the dynamic or the discourse for that was really shaped in the 1930s.
Brennan Rivas:There's a great book written by a friend of mine named Patrick Charles. It's called Vote Gun and he has done a lot of research on this. So any of your listeners interested in following up would do well to check out that book. But then later on there was an acceleration of this in the 1970s and later, and that was around the time that the NRA became yet more active in trying to shape legislation as more of a lobby group and the current gun control, gun rights debate that we have right now was really created as a result of that. And so, beginning in the 70s and 80s, there were certain law scholars who started pushing this in legal circles and they were really capitalizing on the culture, wars and kind of the conservative backlash of the 70s and 80s, trying to paint historical gun regulations as an intrusive government imposition or a relic of racism that we need to get rid of and that has ushered in this new era.
Brennan Rivas:And because originalism as a mode of interpreting the Constitution was really rising to prominence at that time and becoming a more legitimate way of looking at constitutional history. They invoked a lot of history and there was a telling of American history, including a telling of Texas history or history about guns and gun regulation that was not accurate and I think that went a long way toward, in combination with kind of, the romanticization of the wild west. You know, people's vision of what our heritage really is. That vision was informed by inaccurate scholarship and so people have misremembered what the American tradition of regulating guns really is. So it's definitely a 20th century development and this kind of gun rights activism that we see. It's developed over time. There wasn't a one single spark that created it. It's been a long time coming and that's why it's so strong.
Scott Sosebee:Do you think that we will see a reversal of that anytime soon? Go back to some other ideas about regulation, or have we crossed a line that we may not get back from?
Brennan Rivas:Well, you know, that's really hard to answer. I don't think there's a quick fix, because we're talking about something that affects the way people feel and, for a lot of folks, has become a part of how they see themselves. It's a part of one's own identity. For some people they're the guns they own, or what those guns mean for them. So I don't see that kind of thing changing. But I do see that if we keep moving in the direction of rolling back regulations and there's an obvious increase in shootings and crime as a consequence, I do think that a lot of more moderate people are gonna be willing to speak up and I do think that we might see some policy changes. Even if we don't see, you know, cultural or ideological changes that are major, I think we might see some policy compromises.
Scott Sosebee:Brendan, we're reaching towards the end of our time. Next time it's always a minute for everybody we have. This has been a great, great discussion and I really appreciate you being on here. We ask all of our guests they come here as a final question. Brendan Reavits, what do you know?
Brennan Rivas:Well, this is a great question. I'm gonna stick on the theme of why you brought me on, which is the history of gun regulation. Also, what I know is and I didn't invent this, okay the United States has a gun culture. We've also got a gun control culture.
Scott Sosebee:I like it. I like that. That's short and sweet.
Gene Preuss:Short and sweet.
Scott Sosebee:Yeah, I like that.
Gene Preuss:Hey, brendan, I wanna thank you very much for being on the program. I thought it was great information and some new ideas on perspectives that are historical, but we really don't cover very much in our Texas history courses, so I really appreciate your answer, Thank you.
Scott Sosebee:thank you very much. This has been one of our better ones.
Brennan Rivas:Oh well, thanks. I'm very glad to have participated. I'd love to do it again sometime. All right, thanks so much. Yeah, thank you Bye.