...executive orders some of what were probably orders by military authorities during Reconstruction...
What sort of basis do you have for this assertion? I don't mean to be confrontational--I'm actually quite curious about the topic.
Is there a record of executive orders or orders by military authorities prohibiting the carry of firearms?
That aside, it's a stretch to believe that the citizens of TX, seeing how the military and the north treated them in the aftermath of the civil war, decided that they liked the idea of being restricted in similar manner after those prohibitions were lifted.
I don't see why the state would suddenly decide that pre-existing local ordinances needed to be augmented by a state law.
Actually, the seeds were sown much earlier than Jim Crow.
I must confess that I'm not completely following your line of argument.
I take it that you agree (or at least aren't disputing) that the 1871 law (the first TX state law that prohibited the carry of handguns) seems to be intended to suppress the freedmen and seems to have been intended to be selectively enforced.
The 1871 law was quite a significant departure from earlier TX penal code philosophy which doesn't appear to have prohibited weapons at all. It did sometimes state that the use of a weapon would add to the penalty of a particular crime, but there doesn't seem to be any move to prohibit possession or carry of weapons until after the civil war.
Clearly there was a significant change in philosophy around the timeframe of 1871 and it's not at all difficult to find a significant event to correspond with that timeframe that explains that change in philosophy.
I'm not arguing that weapons prohibitions (particularly at the municipal level, or perhaps in times of emergencies or during the imposition of martial law) were unheard of before the 1871 law, but I don't believe it's accurate to imply that the origins of statewide gun control in the south, in general, and in TX, in specific, were unconnected with Jim Crow laws or significantly predate them.