1. Many states expanded gun rights after 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre
2. Why debate on guns never goes anywhere
3. Texas Attorney General says banning guns in college dorms violates “campus carry” law
4. Obama starts 2016 with a fight over gun control with expanded background checks
5. Open Carry officially prohibited in Smith County buildings housing courtrooms

Former state Sen. Wendy Davis was an exciting Democratic candidate for governor in 2014 – a breath of fresh air, after the Democrats ran the lackluster Bill White four years earlier. She was the Democratic Party’s hope for turning the state blue.

That hope was dashed when Texans went to the polls; she lost because she fundamentally misunderstood the race.

Now out of Texas politics, she seems to be making a bid for some national attention. Her new article for Politico Magazine shows that she fundamentally misunderstands some other things, too.

First, her misunderstanding of the Texas gubernatorial race. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat contends she was lulled into a sense of false confidence by the echo chamber she surrounded herself with; the national press loved her and she mistakenly assumed that everyday Texans would agree.

“In that sense, the Wendy Davis experiment isn’t just an example of how media bias on culture-war issues can hurt Democrats (by leading them into fond delusions) as well as help them,” Douthat noted.

Now she’s back, and writing for Politico Magazine about what she considered her biggest mistake: support for “Open Carry.”

“I’m a lifelong Democrat,” she writes. “I proudly boast an ‘F’ rating from the NRA. And, yet, during my 2014 gubernatorial campaign in Texas, I supported the open carry of handguns in my state. It is a position that haunts me.”

She says she was “cowed by political realities” of living in Texas.

“I might be doggedly progressive most of the time, but when it came to staking out my position on the open carry of handguns in a red state, none of that mattered,” she writes. And later, she asks, “If I had chosen differently, might I have moved the needle just a bit on this issue, even in a very conservative state like Texas?”

Here’s where she’s again misreading the issue. In the high-profile discussions about terrorism, mass shootings and gun violence, licensed handgun carriers are not the problem. Open Carry, when it becomes law on Jan. 1, is only available to those who obtain the license.

As the Associated Press explains, “Just like the current concealed handgun law, the (Open Carry) bill requires anyone wanting to openly carry a handgun to get a license.”

The Department of Public Safety studied violent crime rates for all Texans, and broke out the rates for concealed carry license holders, for all of 2011. There were 2,210 aggravated robbery convictions, for example, and only two of those were license holders. Out of 2,675 convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, three were license holders.

Overall, license holders accounted for less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the violent crimes committed in Texas.

That’s because most people with criminal records (above a Class C misdemeanor) are ineligible to get a license. They’re ineligible if they have pending criminal charges, a psychiatric illness or even just if they are behind on their taxes or child support.

Law-abiding citizens aren’t the problem. Criminals are. And they don’t bother with licenses.