Texas Never Actually Banned Shooting Buffalo from Hotel Windows

This 'law' is one of the most widely recycled entries on 'weird laws' listicles across the internet, appearing on hundreds of websites, news articles, and social media posts as a genuine Texas statute. It has the hallmarks of a perfect folk-legal myth: it evokes a vivid Wild West scenario, it sounds just plausible enough given 19th-century frontier life, and it's specific enough (second story! hotel!) to feel like it must have been written down somewhere by someone.

However, when the Texas Legislative Reference Library — the official state body that maintains and researches all Texas legislative history — was asked to verify this claim, they came up empty. A thorough search of every piece of Texas legislation produced no record of any such law. U.S. LawShield, a firearms legal defense organization, also independently confirmed this finding.

The myth almost certainly propagated through the same channels that spread most 'dumb laws': books of legal trivia published in the 1990s and early 2000s (often uncited) that were then scraped wholesale onto early internet list sites, and from there copied endlessly without verification. These claims gain credibility through repetition — once a hundred websites say it, readers assume someone upstream checked the original statute.

The irony is that shooting from a hotel window in Texas would still land you in serious trouble under a variety of real, enforceable laws — including deadly conduct, disorderly conduct, and discharging a firearm within city limits. No buffalo-specific hotel ordinance required.