State Fair gun ban remains in effect

AUSTIN – The Texas Tribune reports that the Supreme Court of Texas on Thursday night denied Attorney General Ken Paxton’s emergency filing seeking to overturn the State Fair of Texas’ policy banning all firearms from its fairgrounds. The fair is set to start Friday.

“It should go without saying—though perhaps it cannot be said often enough—that a judge’s role in this case is not to decide whether the State Fair made a wise decision. Our job, instead, is to decide whether Texas law allowed the State Fair to make the decision for itself. The State declines to take a position on that essential question but nevertheless asks this Court for an injunction overriding the State Fair’s decision,” the court said in its ruling. “It should also go without saying that our answer, for now, must be no.”

The ruling comes two days after a Dallas County District Court struck down a request from Paxton on the fair’s gun policy. The District Court Judge agreed with State Fair officials that they could enforce a gun ban as a private nonprofit.

Paxton, who said hours later on social media that he would ask the state’s Supreme Court to overturn the ban, has maintained that the fair’s gun ban violates state law, which bars most government bodies from prohibiting weapons. State Fair officials say it has the right as a private nonprofit, and the city of Dallas says it has no role in the fair’s gun policy.