In a 13-3 decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed an Everytown for Gun Safety-backed lawsuit that challenged the Texas law regulating carriage of firearms on private property open to the public.
The statute allows private property owners to ban firearms from their premises if they choose, but the property owner is required to give “effective” notice that entry with a handgun is forbidden. That can be accomplished both in writing with language and posting requirements specified by the state, or through oral communication as well.
The plaintiffs in this case were a Unitarian Church and a Houston coffee shop who complained that the required signage was “burdensome”, “ugly,” and “intimidating.” They argued that they were being subjected to compulsory speech, but the Fifth Circuit vehemently disagreed.
Before cataloguing the ways in which plaintiffs’ claims are deficient for standing purposes, a few facts need to be pointed out. The challenged criminal statutes 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. Criminal trespass thus occurs if the licensed gun owner, despite being warned not to enter a property either orally or in writing with a card or according to the prescribed signage, enters and refuses to leave. This means, as the testimony showed, that police may arrest and charge as a trespasser under these provisions a person who was told to leave or was warned by the prescribed sign.
A property owner is not, however, compelled by the criminal statutes to post required signage, and may post whatever warning he or she desires, or no printed warning. In these situations, if a licensed gun toter enters the premises, the property owner may orally advise the person to leave, and if he refuses, the police may arrest the trespasser pursuant to the provisions challenged here. To be precise, the licensed gun carrier has a statutory defense to the trespass statute if he has not been advised by the owner’s oral or prescribed written communication that guns are forbidden on the property. But even then, the owner is not without recourse to the deterrent effect of criminal law: on summoning law enforcement, the owner may have the police provide the statutory oral warning or may eject the intruder. In each instance, the intruder may be prosecuted for violating the challenged statute or the officer’s command.
In other words, there is no compelled speech because the plaintiffs don’t have to post any “ugly” or “intimidating” signs at all. They can simply tell anyone they see who is carrying a firearm that they need to leave, and if that person refuses to do so, they can call police and have them trespassed.
The Fifth Circuit also pointed out what seems to be a pretty obvious flaw in the plaintiffs’ complaint: even if an injunction were granted, it’s unclear what it could actually do.
“There is no ‘compelled’ speech, because they are not compelled to post the prescribed signs in order to eject licensed gun carriers from their premises. ” pic.twitter.com/gKallfru7R
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) July 31, 2026
What Everytown and their plaintiffs were really hoping for is that the courts would impose some kind of “vampire rule” on all private property open to the public where lawful carry would be banned by default. That wasn’t likely to happen in the Fifth Circuit even before the Supreme Court struck down Hawaii’s vampire rule in Wolford, but that outcome is now completely foreclosed by the SCOTUS decision.
Everytown can now take its appeal to the Supreme Court if it wants, but I stand a better chance at winning Powerball tomorrow than the gun control group has at seeing cert granted in this case. We can chalk this up as a win for both the right to bear arms and common sense, and a defeat for the forces of civilian disarmament.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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