How Does My Facility Banning Guns Affect My Tenants’ Rights to Store Guns?
by TSSA Legal Counsel
It’s not entirely clear how posting “no open carry guns” or “no concealed carry guns” signage would affect your tenants’ right to store guns under the language of the Penal Code. Our best guess is that the ban would/could also apply to what is put into storage in units (since we do not find language to the contrary).
The Sections of the Texas Penal Code related to postings for banning guns aren’t entirely helpful on this subject. Sections 30.06 and 30.07 merely say that you cannot carry “on the property of another” without effective consent. Section 30.05 provides a bit more guidance, saying that it is considered a criminal trespass if a person enters or remains on or in the property of another “including residential land, agricultural land, a recreational vehicle park, a building, a general residential operation operating as a residential treatment center, or an aircraft or other vehicle, without effective consent…” While this language does not include “storage units” (or even common areas on a property), it also does not exclude such items, which leads me to take a broad definition of “property” as meaning the entire facility.
Additionally, while the penal code has carveouts for certain types of properties (e.g., owners of condos, owners of apartments within condos, tenants of condos/apartments within condos, carrying a handgun to and from the parking lot and the rental unit, etc.), there is no such carveout for storage units in storage facilities.
From a practical standpoint, you typically would not know if your tenants were storing guns since those guns would be either inside a gun case or packed inside a box or other container and generally not visible to others as the tenant transfers their belongings into a unit. The TSSA lease restricts the storage of ammunition in Paragraph 36(3), mainly because of the fire hazard it presents, but there is no such specific restriction against the storage of guns other than storing “anything illegal…under any law”(Paragraph 36, subsection 11), for example, machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. (These are just two examples of weapons that are illegal to possess; there are others.) You as a facility owner would have to determine whether you really want to turn away customers who want to store guns as part of the contents of the unit.
Having said all of this, we are of course in Texas, so gun laws are generally viewed more favorably to carriers versus business owners. Also, in order for this to be enforceable, the property owner must (a) post the required signage and (b) after seeing a violation, personally gives the license holder notice by oral communication of such violation (and, if the violator fails to leave, they are subject to a Class C misdemeanor). So, practically speaking, a tenant could only get in trouble for this if (a) the required signage is posted, (b) the owner knows that they are storing these weapons, and (c) the owner decides to give them such notice. Ultimately, it will be up to the owner on how they enforce these provisions.
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