Tennessee Kills Bill That Would Allow Communities to Require Permits

A few years ago, Tennessee passed constitutional carry. This was a landmark bill that was much needed. Now, law-abiding citizens don’t need to ask for government permission before exercising their constitutionally protected right to bear arms.

And, of course, the anti-gunners in the state hated it.

While there was a lot of doom and gloom predicted, constitutional carry is still the law in Tennessee, as well as the majority of other states, and the homicide rate crashed in 2025 despite the doomsaying from the anti-gun crowd.

Wierd, right?

Anywho, it seems those same anti-gunners wanted to make constitutional carry into something that was decidedly not constitutional carry. The plan was to allow communities to sort of opt-out of it by requiring permits within the city limits.

Yeah, pretty stupid. Luckily, that stupid is dead.

Legislation that would have allowed local governments to decide if gun owners need a permit failed in the Tennessee Senate.

On Tuesday, the Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee voted against SB0043. The bill, introduced by Sen. London Lamar (D-Memphis) would have given county governments the authority “not to permit” people from carrying handguns without the proper permit through the passage of a resolution.

The legislation would’ve required the appropriate body to notify residents of the resolution by postings in “conspicuous public locations throughout the county.”

“In counties experiencing certain challenges, we would like them to decide if they require a carry permit within those counties through resolution to try to mitigate many of the gun violence and gun deaths we’re seeing in the state of Tennessee,” Lamar said.

Lamar said her proposed legislation was in response to the rise in gun violence across the state. She said this was a way to combat the issue without infringing on “anyone’s Second Amendment” rights.

Lamar, it seems, doesn’t comprehend what “infringing on ‘anyone’s Second Amendment’ rights” actually means.

Requiring a permit, in and of itself, is an infringement on people’s Second Amendment rights. The Founding Fathers included no such provision in any of the laws they crafted to keep people safe. They prohibited people from walking around with a gun while drunk, but not any laws that mandated someone had to get government permission to carry a firearm.

So yeah, that’s an infringement, especially under the Bruen standard of history, text, and tradition of gun laws in this country.

Second, this is absolutely stupid on so many levels. 

Tennessee is a preemption state, so this would create a carve-out to that, and do so in a way that completely undermines the basic reason states have preemption laws in the first place.

If some cities decided to require a permit, and others didn’t, then what you’d run into are people who get jammed for exercising their right without a permit simply because they stopped to get gas, or because they went into a city to handle some business, and were unaware that a permit was required.

On every level, this was stupid.

Luckily, it’s dead, too. However, don’t expect it to stay dead. If there’s one thing we know about anti-gunners, they don’t stop pushing an idea unless they find a worse one to push instead.

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

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