Tennessee Town Needs Wake-Up Call on Park Gun Ban

Tennessee is pretty good on guns, despite what one might expect from a state with so many larger urban centers. However, they’re not perfect. No one is. Unlike a lot of states, though, they’re working toward fixing that.

Currently, there’s a measure in the works that would remove the prohibition on law-abiding citizens carrying firearms in public parks.

Every state has some gun-free zones beyond the handful handed down by the feds, and Tennessee currently doesn’t let people carry in parks. They want to fix that, and the town council of Dickson doesn’t like that.

The Dickson City Council passed a resolution opposing a bill that would amend several statutes regarding firearms, including repealing the prohibition on carrying firearms in local parks.

At their March 16 special session, the Council unanimously approved Resolution #2026-26 opposing House Bill 2064 by Rep. Chris Todd, R.-Madison County, and Senate Bill 2467 by Sen. Paul Bailey, R.-Sparta, currently under consideration in the 114^th Tennessee General Assembly.

Among other changes, the bill proposes to remove state law that prohibits carrying a weapon in public parks.

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Resolution #2026-26 states, “the Council of the City of Dickson, Tennessee, wishes to maintain the authority to decide whether to allow or prohibit the carrying of firearms or other dangerous weapons in parks and recreational areas where the public, including children of all ages, gather.”

City Administrator David Travis said the city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board instituted a ban on firearms in city parks several years ago. “We want to keep it the way it is now,” Travis said.

I get that they want to keep it the way it is, but the way it is doesn’t really do a whole lot.

A quick search for shootings in Tennessee parks includes two in just the last few days. One in Tom Lee Park in Memphis saw a teenage girl shot. Another was Saturday in Coolidge Park in Chattanooga. A couple of weeks ago, a woman was shot and killed at a cancer walk at Shelby Farms Park in Memphis.

That’s not even me delving into the total number of shootings in public parks over the last year. This is just some shootings in March I found after a relatively brief, half-assed search of news stories. 

Bad people carry wherever they want to carry. They’re not able to lawfully carry a gun at all, so gun-free zones mean nothing to them.

They only mean something to regular people who try to go through their life, following at least most of the rules, with very minor exceptions like speeding, will be disarmed in a wide open place with little cover, should someone decide to start shooting. They’ll have no way to defend themselves, even as it’s obvious to anyone with half a neuron in their skull that the bad guys won’t hold to such restrictions.

I get that the Dickson City Council thinks it makes their community safer. I get that they’d like to keep things the same.

I’d disagree with them even if there was some evidence that the law did some kind of good, but it’s absolutely impossible to take their request seriously, considering how many park shootings I could find in the state in just the last couple of weeks. If it did some good, you’d think Memphis wouldn’t have had two people shot, one fatally, in public parks this month.

At least.

Editor’s Note: The fight for our Second Amendment rights isn’t just taking place in Washington, D.C. or our state capitals. Anti-gun activists are hard at work at the local level as well. 

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