The day after the State Fair of Texas ended, Attorney General Ken Paxton told an appeals court he would keep fighting a new policy banning most attendees from carrying guns, court records show.
State attorneys filed a motion Monday to dismiss Paxton’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that upheld the Fair’s firearms policy, which was put into place this year. Paxton made three attempts to get court orders to block the ban before opening day last month, arguing the restriction was illegal. He was denied each time.
“Because the State Fair ended on October 20, the state no longer wishes to pursue this appeal from the denial of a temporary injunction,” the Oct. 21 motion to the 15th District Court of Appeals in Austin said. “The state intends to continue litigating its case in the trial court.”
Online court records in Dallas County Civil District Court, where Paxton first sued the State Fair, Dallas and its interim city manager over the policy, show a trial date tentatively set for next June.
The State Fair of Texas is one of the biggest annual celebrations in the state and welcomed close to 2.4 million people from Sept. 27 through last weekend.
Fair officials announced in early August it was banning visitors from bringing firearms into South Dallas’ 277-acre Fair Park for the 24-day event. The policy change came after a man shot three people during last year’s festivities. The Fair previously allowed attendees with a valid handgun license to bring firearms as long as they were concealed.
Karissa Condoianis, a State Fair of Texas spokeswoman, said organizers “received overwhelmingly positive feedback from fairgoers” this year about the policy change. She said she didn’t know of any complaints that were made about it from people who attended the fair.
“This was not meant to be a political statement in any way,” Condoianis told The Dallas Morning News. “This was what we felt was the right thing to do to have a safe and secure environment at the fair and we’re just thankful that we were able to provide that for our millions of visitors.”
State law doesn’t require Texans to have a permit to carry a firearm in a public place. The Fair’s firearm ban doesn’t apply to active and retired law enforcement officers.
The policy change led to a rebuke from dozens of Republican lawmakers and the Republican attorney general. Paxton has argued that the policy violates gun owners’ rights and that Dallas, as the owner of the fairgrounds, had a duty to force the Fair to drop its ban to allow people to carry firearms lawfully on government-owned property.
In legal responses, city officials said they played no role in creating or enforcing the Fair’s policies and wouldn’t intervene. The nonprofit fair officials and attorneys representing the group asserted the new rule was meant to increase visitors’ safety and the law allows private groups to limit access to government-owned property under lease.
They pointed to other events around the state with similar restrictions, like the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and cited Paxton’s own past legal opinions. The attorney general, for instance, rejected a complaint in 2016 over the privately run Dallas Zoo banning guns from its city-owned property.
Paxton in September withdrew a similar legal opinion in a separate 2016 case. That opinion, prompted by Erath County Attorney Lisa Pence on whether a nonprofit can restrict people with firearms from coming onto city-owned property, was cited in an Aug. 14 letter to Paxton by two Republican state lawmakers asking the attorney general’s opinion on the State Fair’s new policy.
In a petition to the Texas Supreme Court, Paxton described the opinion as “outdated” and said he withdrew it because several legal developments have occurred since 2016, including the state Legislature allowing permitless carry in 2021.
The state’s arguments were rejected by Dallas County District Judge Emily Tobolowsky, a Democrat, on Sept. 19; the Austin-based state appeals Court, which has three Republican judges, on Sept. 24, and finally by the all-Republican state Supreme Court on the night before the first day of the Fair.
The justices noted in their opinion the state took no position on whether the Fair, as a private entity, has the legal authority to ban patrons from carrying guns and instead focused on arguing that Dallas shouldn’t enforce the Fair’s policy. They said they can’t order the fair to allow handguns if the state doesn’t say whether the law mandates the group to do it.
“Law-abiding handgun owners in Texas know that there are certain places where they may not carry their weapon,” reads a Sept. 26 opinion. “They need to know — with maximum clarity — whether the State Fair is one of those places. Yet the state’s filings do not even attempt to answer that question.”
