It’s widely known that, in Texas, a person can obtain a license to carry a handgun. Less known, however, is that a history of substance abuse can render a person ineligible to carry a handgun in Texas. In fact, even a remote history of substance abuse can render you ineligible.
Texas law provides that a person is eligible to apply for a license to carry a handgun if certain requirements are met. Put more accurately, a person is eligible to apply for a license to carry a handgun unless they fall within one of excluded categories mentioned in the Government Code (s411.172, to be precise). Reading down the list, it is clear that Texas law provides that a “person is eligible for a license to carry a handgun if…the person is not a chemically dependent person,” among other prohibitions. (411.172(a)(6)). So, a “chemically dependent person” is not eligible to apply for a license to carry a handgun in Texas. What does that even mean?
A person is “chemically dependent” under Texas law if the person “frequently or repeatedly becomes intoxicated by excessive indulgence in alcohol” or the person “uses controlled substances or dangerous drugs so as to acquire a fixed habit and an involuntary tendency to become intoxicated on those substances as often as the opportunity is presented.” Note that habitual drinking to intoxication or binge drinking renders a person ineligible, as well as being chemically dependent on controlled substances or dangerous drugs.
Problematic here is the use of terms like “frequently,” “excessive,” and “repeatedly,” and, the only slightly better, “as often as the opportunity is presented.” Temporally, these tell you nothing—my “frequent” might be your “occasionally,” or vice versa. My “excessive” might be your version of “in extreme moderation.”
Does “frequently” cover the person who gets drunk twice a year on New Year’s Eve and then on the Fourth of July? Certainly, this is “repeatedly,” as anything done more than once is, by definition, “repeated.” And it is “frequent” insofar as it is a regular occurrence—ever NYE and Fourth of July.
These terms are, in other words, relative and grossly imprecise. (Incidentally, these are words people in the legal world—lawyers, judges, even probation officers—hate because they are so vague and indefinite.
So we know that existing chemical dependency bars eligibility. But, chemical dependency—even if treated—bars eligibility to obtain a license to carry a handgun under a provision that prohibits a person who “is not capable of exercising sound judgment with respect to the proper use and storage of a handgun” from being issued a license, if the person “has been diagnosed by a license physician as suffering from a psychiatric disorder or condition that causes or is likely to cause substantial impairment to judgment, mood, perception, impulse control, or intellectual ability.” Wait a minute, you say, chemical dependency is mentioned nowhere in that sentence.
Well, Texas law provides that “in-patient or residential substance abuse treatment in the preceding five-year period” or “diagnosis in the preceding five-year period by a licensed physician that the person is dependent on alcohol, a controlled substance, or similar substance” is “evidence of the aforementioned “psychiatric condition” that prohibits eligibility. Unless you get a note from your doctor, apparently, stating that the “condition is in remission and is not reasonably likely to develop at a future time”—which, by the way, seems totally contrary the vast majority of substance abuse recovery models which urge that a person is always an addict or alcoholic and is constantly “in recovery.”
In Texas, untreated substance abuse bars license eligibility to carry a handgun. Fair enough.
But, Texas also bars license eligibility for anyone treated for substance abuse in the past five years. Five years. Unless you have a note from a physician, stating something no qualified, self-respecting physician would ever say.
If you’re waiting for the part where this makes sense, it’s not going to happen.