The NRA Is in Dallas, and No, You Don’t Have to Check Your Gun at the Door

DALLAS — At the annual National Rifle Association meeting in Dallas, guns are quite literally everywhere — on display at exhibit booths and emblazoned on T-shirts, banners and coffee mugs. In one busy corner, people stopped to take pictures of a piece of gun art on display: a giant sculpture, made with hundreds of balloons, of a Glock 27 .40-caliber pistol.

But can NRA members bring their personal guns to the event? The answer, like everything else in the gun debate, is complicated.

Thousands of members of the nation’s most powerful gun-rights group are gathering at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center for four days, from Thursday to Sunday, for the group’s annual convention.

Attendees who have a handgun license can personally arm themselves by wearing their firearm concealed under their clothes or out in the open in a holster on their hip. They can do so in most areas of the convention center, whether shopping for gun-themed apparel at the NRA Store or wandering the exhibit hall, officially described as “15 acres of guns and gear.” On Thursday, few members were wearing their weapons openly, but several said they might well have something under their jackets.

On Friday, however, the exception to the weapons rule kicked in.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence spoke Friday in the convention center’s arena. NRA officials announced that the arena would be under the control of the Secret Service during the leadership forum that the president and vice president were attending. Guns, knives and “weapons of any kind” would be prohibited in the arena before and during Trump’s attendance at the event, the NRA said in a statement.

“While it’s secured by the Secret Service for the president and vice president, their rules apply,” said Jennifer Baker, an NRA spokeswoman.

No storage areas are available for firearms, but a group called Knife Rights was providing complimentary storage for knives. The list of prohibited items in the arena is extensive and includes not only guns but also laser pointers, drones, ammunition and selfie sticks.

The ban on firearms and other weapons applied only to the arena where Trump spoke Friday and not to the other parts of the annual meeting, including the exhibit hall.

NRA members expressed no frustration at the ban on firearms at the arena and described it as a reasonable security precaution for the president. Critics of the organization and its convention, however, have seized on the ban as a sign of hypocrisy.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Dwaine R. Caraway, a Dallas City Council member who publicly called on the NRA to reconsider bringing the convention to Dallas following the February mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. “If everybody is so respectful and honorable, what’s happening? That in itself tells you that they feel a possible risk.”

Inside the convention center Thursday, the few attendees who did choose to carry their weapons openly were a reminder of just how pro-gun Texas has become.

Bringing a weapon into the convention center was not a privilege given only to NRA members. Anyone who has a license to carry a handgun can walk into the city-owned convention center with their firearm at any time during any convention or gathering. A spokeswoman for the convention center said any firearms that are legally carried in accordance with state law are allowed in the building. In Texas, handgun licensees can attend the NRA meeting armed, eat at many restaurants armed and pray at many churches armed.

Some of the NRA members who were carrying their weapons at the convention center Friday were residents of Texas and had a state-issued handgun license. But even those from out-of-state were allowed to carry in the building. Texas has agreements with a number of other states to honor those states’ handgun licenses, so a Louisiana license or a Montana license, to name but two, effectively becomes a Texas license while the gun owner is in Texas.

The careful attention to gun freedoms, however, doesn’t mean that anything goes. A notice was posted prominently on the convention center’s glass doors, in red letters on the glass. It read: “This is a smoke-free facility.”