Key Takeaways
- The Fifth Circuit Court dismissed a lawsuit challenging Texas laws on firearm notices in public establishments.
- Plaintiffs argued the required signs are burdensome and amount to compelled speech, but the court found their claims lacking for standing.
- Texas law allows property owners to bar firearms with effective notice, either through signs or verbal communication.
- Court clarified that owners don’t have to post state-mandated signs, and any warning gives them the right to refuse entry to armed customers.
- The ruling doesn’t change property owners’ rights to keep guns off their property, focusing instead on the aesthetics of communication.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
HOUSTON, TX — The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed an Everytown for Gun Safety-backed lawsuit that challenged the Texas law governing how private property owners open to the public keep firearms off their premises. The vote was 13-3.
The plaintiffs were a Unitarian church and a Houston coffee shop, and their complaint was about signs. They argued the notice Texas requires is burdensome, ugly and intimidating, and that being made to post it amounted to compelled speech. The court’s opinion catalogues the ways those claims are, in its words, “deficient for standing purposes.”
The underlying law is worth understanding on its own terms, because it affects every person who carries in the state. Texas carry law lets a private property owner bar firearms from the premises if that is what the owner wants. What the statute requires is effective notice. That can be given in writing, using language and posting requirements the state specifies, or it can be given out loud.
That second option is the part the lawsuit ran into. The opinion explains that no property owner is compelled by the criminal statutes to post the state’s prescribed signage at all. An owner may post whatever warning he or she desires, or no printed warning, and may still simply advise an armed customer to leave. If that person refuses, police may arrest and charge the person as a trespasser. The court describes the challenged statutes as provisions that “were designed to accommodate property owners’ constitutional right to refuse access to gun toters while protecting the rights of licensed gun owners to carry open or concealed firearms.”
There is a flip side the opinion spells out. A licensed carrier has a statutory defense to the trespass statute if the owner never gave notice, orally or through the prescribed written form. Notice is what triggers the criminal exposure. Absent notice, the carrier has a defense.
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Set the litigation aside for a second, because the practical rule for armed citizens does not change either way. Notice is notice. A sign is one form of it. A person telling you to leave is another, and it carries the same weight. If a property owner or an employee tells you to go, you go, immediately and without argument, and you sort out your feelings about it in the parking lot. Refusing turns a lawful carry into a trespass charge, and no carry mindset worth having ends with you standing your ground over a cup of coffee.
What strikes me about this case is who brought it and what they were asking for. A church and a coffee shop already had the authority to keep guns off their property. They had it before the suit, they have it now, and nothing about this ruling takes it away. The fight was over the aesthetics and burden of how that authority gets communicated, funded by a national gun control organization, and the practical effect of winning would have been to make the line between lawful carry and criminal trespass harder for a carrier to see, not easier.
Read the full article here