TexasCHLforum.com

To give some further LEO insight into this thread, I would point out a few minor things. I have no idea why the officer first stopped the truck for real. He may have been looking for a similar truck as posited, or he may have just madea mistake with his radar unit. He may even have just been fishing. But he did not know until the truck was stopped that the driver had a CHL. Running the tag gives the owner of the truck and not the driver. A few municipalities (San Antonio I know of) have a program which will automatically check the tag with the municipal court database also, givign all of the drivers who have been ticketed in the truck> DPS does not normally have this capability.

I feel confident that he did not stop the truck based on the tag returning a CHL for a much more prosaic reason. He probably could not read the tag until he was already behind the truck stopping it. Stand by the highway sometime and try to read the license plate of a car going by you, especially in traffic, at 72 mph. It is not easy.

As for running the serial number to create a database, it is not going to happen soon. The gun query just gets the serial number of the gun and can return several different guns (based on make and caliber, there can be more than one with the same serial number). It does not get the name of the person holding the gun when it was run. Some of this might be able to be captured by also tying the gun query to the tag or dl queries, but what happens when more than one person in the car gets run? And if there is no hits on the query, there is no way to get the make and model of the gun. So, this is not likely to happen anytime in the near future. It would take too much reprogramming of the computers and there is no way that could be kept secret.

Finally, anytime an officer tells you that there is a policy of something, you can check it. Police department policies are public information. All you need to do is send an open records request to the agency for a copy of all policies or memos concerning that subject. I would just ask for copies of all policies dealing with traffic stops or dealing with CHL's. I would also ask for any training records on these subjects. I would almost be willing to bet there is no agency policy asking officers to run pistol serial numbers. There may be agency policies on disarming CHL's though.