Dallas Mayor: Open Carry Made It Difficult to Identify Suspects

“There was also the challenge of sorting out witnesses from potential suspects”, Max Geron, a Dallas police major told the Dallas Morning News.

It is legal for firearm owners in Texas, as in much of the nation, to openly display long guns, like rifles or shotguns, as long as they don’t do so in a menacing fashion. The corrected the error, but the mistake was a glaring example of the problems that can arise from Texas’ open carry gun laws. “Our police grabbed some of those individuals, took them to police headquarters, and worked it out and figured out they were not the shooters”.

“I just got out of the interrogation room for about 30 minutes with police officers lying, saying they had video of me shooting, which is a lie”, Hughes said live on CBS 11 News afterward.

Rawlings said the suspected shooter had threatened to “blow up our police officers”.

Upon hearing he was a person of interest, he gave his rifle to the police, was taken in and interrogated, before being released.

Police chief David Brown, appearing on CNN, declined to answer questions about gun control, but made it clear that the prevalence of armed protesters – many who donned gas masks and had AR-15-style rifles slung over their shoulders – added to the confusion.

“There’s been the presumption that a good guy with a gun is the best way to resolve some of these things”, he said. “I think it’s wonderful when you think that there is a gunfight going on, and you are supposed to be able to sort who the good guys are and who the bad guys are”. As a strong supporter of Second Amendments rights with a license to open carry, Hughes brought his rifle to the protest march.

But C.J. Grisham, president of Open Carry Texas, dismissed the idea and said it’s not hard to find the “the bad guys” in a shooting.

“This is the first time – but a very concrete time – that I think a law can hurt citizens, police and not protect them”, he told the Times. “I wasn’t there real time to kind of see it go on, but the common sense would tell you, you don’t know where the gunfire’s coming from”.