The middle-aged man, seated near the front of the room for a training on when he could use deadly force, expressed displeasure upon being told that doing so often was not legally advisable. He had driven to a suburban Fort Worth church to attend a seminar hosted by the True Texas Project, a prominent right-wing group. He asked what he could do if he returned to his home to find a squatter there—a “common problem” around the state, as he put it. Former police officer John Arenz, who volunteered to help lead the seminar, advised him there could very well be legal consequences for shooting someone who did not pose an immediate threat. “It doesn’t matter how indigent the person is, and it doesn’t matter how justified you are,” Arenz said, “you’re going to be sued.” He also mentioned the threat of criminal prosecution.
The man lamented the “system” that would allow such litigation. “With all due respect, I don’t care about the law,” he said. “If someone’s broken into my house, they’re a threat to my life, and they need to either leave immediately or get the consequence.”
Others in the audience pressed Arenz with follow-up nightmare scenarios, seeking clarity on when deadly force was acceptable: a man is running at me with a knife across my lawn, an elderly woman posed; a man is running at me in my house, but it’s dark, so I can’t tell if he has a weapon, hypothesized another elderly woman. (The crowd was largely gray-haired.) Arenz, who is not a lawyer, painted a grim (and questionable) picture of the civil suit that would inevitably follow a self-defense shooting. The court will immediately seize your assets and freeze your bank account, he said. Another older woman piped up. “Even if you shoot him in the kneecap?” Arenz replied matter-of-factly, “Even if you shoot him in the kneecap.”
The crowd’s concerns were understandable. The question of when one may shoot another person and escape legal consequences is newly top of mind. Daniel Perry, the openly racist Uber driver convicted of murder after killing another legally armed Texan at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, was pardoned by Governor Greg Abbott in May—but his conviction in 2023 remains a source of outrage for many on the far right. The few dozen folks who gathered in a meeting room of the House of Grace church, in North Richland Hills, had come seeking clarity about the law that had been central to the Perry case. They were supposed to get guidance from an instructor from the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, but he had failed to show up. So two audience members—Arenz and Dallas-area firearms instructor Jerah Hutchins—stepped in. Arenz, dressed head to toe in gray, apart from a “thin blue line” patch on his shirt, wore a handgun on his hip. Hutchins proudly informed the audience that she was concealing a gun somewhere under her breezy, summer-ready, off-the-shoulder dress.
Julie McCarty, founder of the True Texas Project, has publicly sympathized with the white supremacist gunman who, motivated by the racist conspiracy theory that Democrats are importing undocumented migrants to replace white Americans, killed 23 El Pasoans, most of them Hispanic, at a Walmart in 2019. (“I don’t condone the actions, but I certainly understand where they came from,” she said.) Just days after the stand-your-ground event, the True Texas Project became embroiled in a related controversy when the Texas Tribune reported on its upcoming fifteenth-anniversary conference, which will feature speakers promoting Christian nationalism, the “great replacement” theory, and “The War on White America.” McCarty blamed the ensuing outrage, and the subsequent cancellations of a few guest panelists, on “woke attacks.” She then cheerily announced that Kyle Rittenhouse, the baby-faced gun enthusiast who killed two men at a Wisconsin Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, would fill an opening and speak at the conference.
Rittenhouse, notably, was acquitted after claiming his right to self-defense under Wisconsin’s laws—but not before being subjected to a criminal trial many on the right saw as a form of persecution. During the training at the House of Grace church, instructors carefully reviewed exactly what constitutes self-defense in Texas. Every state’s penal code contains protections for those who kill or injure others in self-defense, but only in the past two decades did states begin systematizing the right to go on the attack immediately upon perceiving a threat, rather than requiring that those who are threatened first retreat, if that is an option. In 2007 Texas adopted a stand-your-ground law, which, Hutchins explained, outlines that deadly force may be used if you believe you or another person to be in immediate danger, you are allowed to be wherever the attack is taking place, and you are not committing a crime at the time of the attack. Thirty-four other states have embraced similar rules.
The law was at the heart of the defense of Perry, a white former U.S. Army sergeant. He and his lawyers argued that he shot Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster, a white U.S. Air Force veteran, in self-defense, arguing that Foster had raised the rifle he was legally carrying. Witnesses contradicted that claim, as did Perry’s initial statement to the police the night of the murder. A jury of Perry’s peers was not swayed by his defense. But Abbott, always sensitive to issues that animate the right wing of his party, issued a full pardon to Perry, at the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, all of whose members he appointed. “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense,” Abbott said, “that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”
Most in the True Texas Project crowd seemed certain that their interpretations of Texas law were correct, but they expressed worry about those progressive district attorneys and juries—perhaps even more than about the threat of civil litigation. The speakers pointed to the Perry case as evidence that liberals are trying to trample on Texans’ liberties. “I don’t care how justified the use of force is going to be, down in Austin—the Travis County district attorney, he’s going to indict you no matter what, I guarantee that,” said Arenz, apparently unaware that indictments are issued not by DAs but by grand juries populated by registered voters. “A lot of Texas counties—Travis, Harris, Dallas—have very liberal district attorneys. They don’t believe people should have guns. They don’t believe people should use guns to defend themselves.”
After the event, I chatted with Arenz as we walked to the parking lot. He spoke about the need for women of my “stature” to carry a handgun—as if by simply not having a firearm, I was a potential victim anywhere I went. If a large man attacked me, he noted, it wouldn’t be like in Charlie’s Angels, a campy fantasy in which a small woman could beat a hulking opponent in hand-to-hand combat. He recommended I buy a Sig Sauer P226, .40 caliber. He walked me to my car and offered to open my door.
The next night, in nearby Rockwall, the True Texas Project hosted a second gun seminar. This time, Stacey Elfarr, an instructor with the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, explained to a crowd of some thirty gun enthusiasts that her group would help audience members if they faced legal troubles or needed bail money after shooting someone. USCCA offers “self-defense liability insurance” for this purpose. (One man at the event in North Richland Hills said he’d purchased such insurance to fend off lawsuits.)
Elfarr—tan and muscular, with long, honey-colored hair extensions—told audience members that they might be prosecuted for the use of deadly force even if it did not result in death. She stopped midsentence to note that she was about to broach a topic she was particularly passionate about, then warned the crowd: “You are only as safe as the DA prosecutor that is looking at your case.” She too referenced the Perry conviction. “What about the Uber driver? Are y’all familiar with that case? He was pardoned by Abbott, but he spent almost four years in prison first.” (Perry spent one year in state prison following his conviction.) “He was a veteran—that really made me angry. He didn’t do anything wrong, in my opinion.”
Though warm and receptive when I approached to ask her about Perry, Elfarr had only a cursory familiarity with his trial. “I don’t know a lot about the case,” she admitted. “But I do know he had a gun pointed at his head”—an assertion unsupported by any evidence presented at Perry’s trial. She offered repeated clarifications that Perry had not been a USCCA member and emphasized that the association did not get involved in politics.
The specifics of Perry’s case, for Elfarr and others, were largely beside the point. Perry—a right-wing Army veteran who shot a Black Lives Matter protester in liberal Austin—represented the most harrowing possible version of the misfortune most feared by the folks who’d gathered. He was not only arrested and prosecuted, but indicted and then convicted. If it happened to him, it could happen to you, speakers warned. Abbott’s pardon, though welcome, didn’t eliminate the risk.
Dennis London, a former Republican primary candidate for a Rockwall-based Texas House district who attended Elfarr’s lecture, said he wasn’t surprised Perry was pardoned but that gun rights were “constantly under attack.” He insisted he wasn’t a far-right extremist, but rather a constitutional conservative who believed in the exchange of ideas, in adults engaging in civilized dialogue—politely. Then he parroted a common saying in Texas: “An armed society is a polite society.”
