Memphis Democrat Pitches National Gun Licensing Scheme

It’s tough out there for anti-gunners these days. Gun ownership is up, homicides are down dramatically, and violent crime overall is trending in the right direction as well. Those are all things worth cheering, but for the gun control lobby these positive developments are making it harder to make their primary pitch: we need to restrict the right to keep and bear arms in order to keep us safe. 

Harder, but not impossible, especially if you’re an anti-gun politician who doesn’t mind playing fast and loose with the facts. 

Gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children in this country. Think about how devastating that is.

Most reasonable firearm owners believe that a permit should be required to own a gun. I’m running for Congress to help make that a reality. https://t.co/GF2e9tzmAD pic.twitter.com/bcrqFjsmLg

— Justin J. Pearson (@Justinjpearson) September 8, 2026

Gun injuries are only the leading cause of death for children if you don’t count any child under the age of 1. And most of the firearm-involved fatalities are clustered among older teens between the ages of 15 and 17. For those between the ages of 1 and 15, traffic fatalities are the leading cause of death. 

The primary issue when looking at gun-involved deaths for those under the age of 18 is criminal misuse of a firearm, not accidental shootings. Why would Pearson believe that a national permitting scheme to simply own a firearm would do anything to address juvenile crime, given these individuals aren’t old enough to legally possess a firearm in the first place? 

Call it the trickle-down theory of gun control. If we make it harder for people to legally own a gun, then eventually it will become harder to illegally own one too. Fewer legal guns means fewer guns to steal, and putting onerous restrictions in place for those wanting to exercise their Second Amendment rights will result in more Americans deciding it’s not worth the time and expense. 

There are a few problems with those assumptions, though. As Georgetown professor William English discovered in his 2026 National Firearms Survey, there are about 88 million gun-owning Americans, and other surveys have estimated about 500 million guns in private hands in the United States. There is simply no way we’re going to ban our way to safety, and putting a restrictive federal gun licensing scheme in place is only going to turn otherwise lawful gun owners in to criminals when they don’t comply. 

Violent crimes involving firearms are steadily declining across the country, including in Memphis, where violent crime is down 30 percent this year according to the Crime Index. Murders in Memphis have dropped by 41 percent compared to last year, and aggravated assaults are down by almost 30 percent as well. Pearson should be celebrating those developments, not ignoring them, but there are a couple of reasons why the Democrat can’t do that. 

Unfortunately for Pearson, at least some of the credit has to go to President Trump’s crime task force and the deployment of National Guard troops in the city. And these staggering crime declines are happening without the state of Tennessee or the federal government implementing any new gun control laws. What’s happening in Memphis right now is living proof that you don’t have to criminalize the right to keep and bear arms to improve public safety, but Pearson can’t acknowledge that without discrediting his own anti-gun ideology. 

We don’t need a national gun licensing scheme to make us safer, and there’s no way of putting a scheme like that in place without violating the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. No enumerated right can be withheld until we obtain a government-issued permission slip, and that includes our right to keep and bear arms. 

The good news for gun owners is that Pearson is an underdog in his attempt to make it to Congress. Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District has historically been Democrat-dominated, but after Republican redistricting it’s now rated R+9 by Cook Political Report. That doesn’t mean that Pearson is guaranteed to lose in November, but if the district’s gun owners and Second Amendment supporters show up on Election Day then Pearson and his gun control schemes are almost certain to be defeated. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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