It's Texas. He was probably shooting at a liberal. It's de facto legal there. The Governor just pardoned a convicted murderer. This Uber driver had posted on line and in text messages that he wanted to kill racial justice protesters, then drove to a protest. He then found an armed protester (again, it's Texas so of course there was one there), and got in an argument with him. Eventually, he got tired of waiting for the protester to point a gun at him so he could claim self defense and just shot the protester to death anyway. He was convicted and sentenced to jail. Abbott however, decided that that was unfair. He said, and this is a quote, “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground' laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

So you see, in Texas, shooting at people, even killing them, isn't apparently against the law if the people you are shooting at are liberals.

Firing "at" people could be attempted murder or all the way down to negligent discharge or something, depends on the details of the circumstance (what "at" means) and any plea deals and how vigorous the DA wants to be about it. And this could have all happened before everything wound it way through the courts and he was found guilty of attempted murder even if it was the felony route. It's hard to say just from that much how fucked he really is (well, until the next time he does something like this which sounds fairly likely to happen as his life continues on its present course).

The fact that they're going after him for having the firearm under the protection order instead of for being a felon makes it likely to me that he wasn't a felon at the time he was doing all these shooting-ats.

So... The law isn't static. With the previous Supreme Court ruling lending more power to the constitutional right to own and carry guns all those laws that you mentioned that originally banned him no longer have rock solid ground for existing at all.

Basically a state can pass any law it likes, it's only once it gets used against someone that it can go through the process of being tested as a valid law by punch testing it's capacity as constitutional violation. If there is a change to the precedent of the Constitution then then anything still in the appeals process can invoke the law as long as they can bring up reasonable proof that a current trial can support questions of constitutional violations.

His defense was basically capitalizing on a change in the law to bring into question every gun law on the books that was, prior to the new Supreme Court ruling was considered fairly standard... If the Supreme Court judged the state law in conflict with the new established constitutional interpretation basically the arrest isn't valid and the persecution would have to reconstruct the case from scratch and re-trial... And creating a domino effect potentially destroying all state gun restrictions. It's not surprising that they ruled how they did. They'd get so much kickback...