The Fifth Circuit now finds itself staring down another post-Bruen reckoning, this time over Texas’s scattershot list of “sensitive places” that still treat everyday Texans like presumptive threats the moment they step into a restaurant, racetrack, or ballpark. FPC’s brief in Ziegenfuss v. Martin doesn’t merely recycle the usual talking points; it methodically dismantles the state’s attempt to dress up 19th-century surety laws and Reconstruction-era Black Codes as a “historical tradition” that somehow justifies disarming law-abiding citizens in ordinary public spaces. By forcing the court to confront whether these bans are consistent with the nation’s actual founding-era practices—rather than modern policy preferences—the coalition is turning the Supreme Court’s history-and-tradition test into a practical weapon against the incrementalist strategy of banning carry one venue at a time.

What makes this appeal especially sharp is how it exposes the incoherence at the heart of Texas’s current regime: the same legislature that proudly expanded constitutional carry now clings to a patchwork of location-based prohibitions that would have been unthinkable to the generation that ratified the Second Amendment. If the Fifth Circuit accepts the state’s invitation to treat restaurants and sporting events as quasi-forts or polling places, it will effectively green-light a nationwide game of regulatory whack-a-mole in which any popular gathering spot can be declared off-limits by legislative say-so. Conversely, a win here would send an unmistakable signal that Bruen isn’t just a paper victory; it actually constrains states from converting the public square into a series of government-approved gun-free zones.

For the broader 2A community, the stakes extend well beyond Texas. A favorable ruling would give litigators in other circuits a ready-made template for attacking similarly arbitrary “sensitive place” regimes, while a loss would hand anti-carry legislators a roadmap for entrenching new restrictions before the next election cycle. Either way, FPC’s willingness to keep pressing these cases ensures that the post-Bruen landscape is shaped by sustained, strategic litigation rather than by the slow creep of unchallenged regulations.