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Rights
Constitutional Carry: The Danger of Tennessee’s Recent Gun Law By Samantha Tancredi, SS Law and Political Science, Former Editor in Chief Editor’s Note: This article discusses gun violence, which some readers may find distressing This summer I had the humbling opportunity to intern for the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office in Memphis, Tennessee, where I learned directly from exceptional attorneys about the function of a prosecutorial role. Given the intense political climate in the United States with regard to the police force, I felt confident that taking a job that consistently interacts with this agency would be informative and would help me in shaping a more holistic view of law enforcement. When interacting with the police officers during orientation, as well as discussing Memphis news and politics amongst the interns, one salient conversation in particular constantly resurfaced: the constitutional carry laws that recently came into force in the state of Tennessee on July 1, 2021. This made Tennessee the 19th state in the US to adopt this law. Constitutional carry laws (also coined ‘permit-less carry’) allow individuals aged 21 and over to carry handguns openly without a permit; this also applies to members of the military aged 18 to 20. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee touted this legislation on the basis of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Though widely popularized, it is worth including a brief synopsis of the Second Amendment to ensure clarity of the difference between the new law and the constitutional provisions. The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” The intention behind the language used is to vest power in the people who have the right to an ultimate check on government power and avoid tyranny. Thus, to marry the constitutional carry legislation to the Second Amendment is not blindly inaccurate; there is no requirement in the Constitution for a permit in order to own a firearm. However, safety and public policy concerns clearly pose an imposition to this type of legislation going ahead without criticism and hesitation.
The immediate response to this legislation is to support or oppose it; no one sits idly in the middle on this issue. On one side, gun activists critique the law for not going far enough to grant further rights to citizens; they note that the new law does not apply to long guns, and they argue that non-military members aged 18 to 20 should be allowed to avail of the permit-less carry permissions. The latter point is driven by the fact that Tennessee’s law increases punishments for certain gun crimes, which may apply to 18 to 20 year olds, who are notably excluded from the new permit-less carry law; thus, the critics argue that this age group should not be exempt from what the legislation itself provides. However, the contrary opinion focuses far more on concern for the public, one that this article finds far more compelling. This is first rooted in the objective statistics from this past year that inform the need to protect communities from violent crime, which would logically not entail providing easier access to handguns. According to the New York Times, “although major crimes were down overall, there were an additional 4,901
