The American Civil Liberties Union has joined the National Rifle Association to help protect the rights of Texans to travel with their guns, a move that has almost everybody scratching their heads.

I’m not even sure I know what to make of it, but it’s quite true. Someone in the ACLU chapter down in Texas has apparently realized that the right to self-defense is as important as the right to speech.

That the ACLU in Texas is doing anything related to gun rights is highly unusual; the national organization’s official position, sharply at variance with the Constitution, what few Supreme Court decisions there have been, and the simple lessons of history, is that Americans don’t have a right to own firearms. (Their bizarre Second Amendment position is akin to arguing that the First Amendment only protects government employees’ right to official speech.)

Jacob Sullum fromReason reports:

The ACLU of Texas has joined with the Texas State Rifle Association and the NRA to fight local prosecutors who are defying a law aimed at protecting law-abiding Texans from being arrested for having guns in their cars. State law has long exempted people who have guns in their vehicles while “traveling” from being prosecuted for unlawful carrying of a weapon (UCW), an offense punishable by up to a year in jail. But the definition of “traveling” was fuzzy, leaving gun owners vulnerable to arrest, prosecution, and conviction, depending on how police officers, prosecutors, and judges decided to read and apply the law. In 2005, at the urging of the gun groups and the state ACLU, the legislature passed a law that creates a presumption of “traveling” for any motorist in a private vehicle who is not legally disqualified from owning a gun, does not belong to “a criminal street gang,” is not engaged in criminal activity (beyond minor traffic infractions), and is not carrying the gun in plain view. But in a report issued last February, the ACLU of Texas, the Texas State Rifle Association, and the Texas Criminal Justice Association showed that many district and county attorneys are instructing police to carry on as before, arresting motorists for UCW at their discretion and letting prosecutors and judges sort things out. — Hit and Run

That’s right, in Texas, the legislature has specifically said not to bother ordinary people who are traveling with their guns, people like Katy geologist Keith Patton, who lost a $300 pistol he’d just bought, $1,500 in attorney’s fees, $268 in vehicle impound fees, and a night in jail, because local prosecutors and cops are still harassing law-abiding citizens by arresting them and bringing them up on trumped-up charges.

The controversy, such as can be said to exist, is largely manufactured by the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, which advised local prosecutors to ignore the plain meaning of the law and the intent of the legislature and that police could still arrest law-abiding citizens because, they said, a court had to decide if they were “traveling.”

“Therefore,” it declared, “officers are still acting within their lawful discretion if they arrest a person who might qualify for the traveling defense or the new traveling presumption.”

Or, as Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, which includes Houston, argued, “The presumption of innocence does not make the person innocent.”

Will Harrell, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said that even before the current dispute, his group and the N.R.A. had been collaborating on racial profiling issues, particularly on what he called a “Bubba profile” that made certain white men the focus of gun checks by the police. — New York Times

Harrell said his collaboration with the Texas State Rifle Association came easy. And, “the police don’t know what to think of it,” he told theTimes.

What exactly is the ACLU doing with the gun people? I’m not sure, but if they’re finally starting to protect the civil rights of gun owners, I can hardly complain.