When they went before the judge with clean records the judge dropped the charges. They were both carrying 1911s with another gun between the seat. I learned not to worry about carrying concealed from that.
By the '80s things were changing, but the dirty secret about gun control in the South was that although the laws were on the books, they were selectively enforced.
The dead giveaway as to the target demographic is when those laws were passed. Right after the civil war, when the state legislatures started reconvening, a lot of the Southern states immediately passed a spate of weapons laws. Odd how it wasn't a problem before that, but suddenly it was a priority. The key was that they weren't enforced against "decent white folks"--they were selectively enforced against the freed slaves. Couldn't have them carrying weapons around just because the law said they were free...
To underscore this, in TX, there used to be a traveling exception for carrying handguns. It wasn't actually written in the law, it was based on a court case where (you guessed it) a freedman was caught with a handgun. The judge, in that case, ruled that because he was traveling, he was entitled to carry a handgun. And that was how it was in TX for many years, until the CHL law was passed in 1995. At least that's how it was on the books.
In practice, unless you were obviously up to no good, (or non-white) nobody really cared if you carried a pistol even though it was against the law.
My great-grandfather carried his pistol with him (I have it now--a neat old Colt .38 autopistol) even though the sheriff knew about it. In fact, he even explicitly told the sheriff about it on one occasion. It just wasn't an issue because he wasn't the demographic that the law was enforced against.
This is why I am adamantly opposed to selective enforcement of laws. If a law is on the books, it needs to be enforced against everyone. If that's unacceptable then it needs to be taken off the books. Otherwise it becomes an opportunity to persecute targeted people under the color of law. Selective prosecution is selective persecution.
It's also ironic that in spite of the fact that gun control at the state level in the South had its roots in racism, demographics who should remember that fact and understand the ramifications of it, often don't seem to, and often even actively support the laws that were originally intended to keep them under subjection.