Texas Senate Bill 730 has made some progress. “Local” coverage here. Official record here, but since action just happened there’s not a lot of detail other than “status: out of committee” and “vote: ayes=7 nays=0 pnv=0 abs=0”.

Not much update on the companion bill, HB 1301.

Updated: Yes, it’s actually out of the Senate now, not just committee (their website wasn’t fully updated when I posted… lag). An article. From that article:

The bill drew fire from business leaders, who called it an affront to property rights. Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, warned that it could also spark more workplace gun crimes – particularly at a time when more and more people are losing their jobs.

“People could go out to their car, get their weapon and go after their supervisors or co-workers who hadn’t been laid off,” Hammond said.

I’m still torn on the property rights issue, I admit. But then, I’m OK with concealed carry so if I had a business with employees and an office building there’d be no 30.06 sign out front. I’d rather be surrounded by good guys and hope that all I hired were good guys.

As for the “people could go out to their car” argument well… remember that people could also go out to their car to get their gun and stop the carnage created by someone “going postal”. As well, if someone wanted to go postal but they knew lots of armed employees were around so their little rampage wouldn’t be that productive, it just might serve to deter the rampage in the first place. But in the end, someone bent on going crazy is going to go crazy and we can’t do much to stop it. What we can do is stop abridging law-abiding citizens.