A new law will allow Texans to legally carry a multitude of self-defense weapons.
House Bill 446 seeks to lessen the number of innocent people being charged with a crime for owning legitimate self-defense tools without hurting anyone,
“We recently also lifted the prohibition on switchblades, and so switchblades, brass knuckles… we’re not living in “West Side Story,’” The Texas Standard reports that State Representative Joe Moody says, “In a couple of instances, someone has a legitimate self-defense tool. A young woman who has a keychain for self-defense certainly fits the statute of knuckles. And she was arrested for that. That is… certainly antithetical to our rights to self-defense.”
The law specifically repeals the definition of “knuckles” which was previously, ‘Knuckles means any instrument that consists of finger rings or guards made of a hard substance and that is designed, made, or adapted for the purpose of inflicting serious bodily injury or death by striking a person with a fist enclosed in the knuckles.”
The new law mentions a whole lot of items that will remain illegal but fails to mention clubs. Which is defined in the Texas penal code as, “an instrument that is specially designed, made, or adapted for the purpose of inflicting serious bodily injury or death by striking a person with the instrument, and includes but is not limited to the following: blackjack, nightstick, mace, tomahawk.”
The laws go into effect on the first day of September.
