In 2023, a shooting at the State Fair of Texas injured three people. The nonprofit that runs the fair responded by banning guns.

Ken Paxton sued them for it. He has now lost at every level of the Texas court system.

On Thursday, August 6, the three justices of the 15th Court of Appeals — an all-Republican court — unanimously affirmed a lower court's rejection of his case. The opinion is short and blunt about why he was wrong:

"It does not apply to private entities such as the State Fair."

The state law Paxton was invoking bars local governments from restricting guns in most public spaces. The State Fair of Texas is a private nonprofit. That's the whole ruling.

He lost this argument three separate times

This wasn't one bad day in court. It's a losing streak:

• 2024 — The Texas Supreme Court denied his emergency filing to block the fair's policy.
• 2025 — A Dallas County district court granted the city of Dallas and the State Fair summary judgment and dismissed the case outright.
• 2026 — The 15th Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal, unanimously.

Three courts. Zero wins. All of it public money and staff time from the office of the Texas Attorney General.

The State Fair says it's pleased with the ruling and that the policy is "the correct decision" to protect attendees' safety. The Dallas Morning News reported last month that guns will again be banned at this year's fair, which opens in about a month.

Paxton's office didn't respond to requests for comment.

The part that makes this indefensible

Here is the fact that turns a bad lawsuit into something worse.

In 2016, Ken Paxton's own office issued a formal legal opinion saying that private nonprofits can ban firearms on government-leased land, so long as the government entity "has no control over the decision to post such notice." Later that same year, his office applied that reasoning to let the Fort Worth Zoo post gun-ban signs on city-owned property.

That is exactly the situation at the State Fair. Fair Park is owned by Dallas and leased to the private nonprofit that runs the fair. Dallas has consistently said it plays no role in making or overseeing the fair's gun policy — a point the appeals court nodded at in its ruling.

So when Paxton sued in August 2024, city and fair officials pointed out that his case contradicted his own opinion.

Weeks later, Paxton withdrew the 2016 opinion.

The attorney general's website said it was withdrawn "pending issuance" of a new opinion answering Republican lawmakers' questions about whether the fair was operating jointly with the city. An official in Paxton's office told Dallas officials that any reliance on the 2016 opinion was "misplaced," and offered no explanation of why. A spokesperson declined to comment on the withdrawal.

Sum it up plainly. The state's top lawyer issued a legal opinion. He sued someone for following it. When they pointed that out, he deleted the opinion.

An all-Republican appeals court has now told him his 2016 self had it right.

Who this was for

Dozens of Texas House Republicans pushed back on the fair's policy, arguing the ban makes the event "less safe." Paxton sued shortly after.

The fair adopted the ban because someone opened fire at it and three people were hurt. Millions of Texans go to the State Fair, many of them with kids. The private organization responsible for their safety made a call about its own property.

Paxton spent two years of the state's legal resources trying to override that call — not to protect a Texan from the government, but to force a private nonprofit to admit guns onto its grounds against its will.

For an office that talks constantly about government overreach, that's a strange definition of freedom: the state compelling a private group to change its own safety rules.

He's asking for a promotion

None of this is retrospective. Paxton is the Republican nominee for the United States Senate — a nomination Texas Republicans handed him on top of a record we laid out at the time.

The State Fair suit is a small case, and that's what makes it clarifying. There was no principle at stake that he hadn't already resolved himself in 2016. There was no victim of government overreach. There was a private nonprofit reacting to a shooting at its own event, and an attorney general who decided that was worth two years and three courtrooms.

He lost all three. The guns still won't be at the fair. And the opinion he withdrew to make the argument possible is still gone.

Source

Alex Nguyen, "Appeals court rejects Attorney General Ken Paxton's effort to overturn Texas State Fair gun ban," The Texas Tribune, August 6, 2026. Earlier reporting by Jasper Scherer. Photo: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune.