Pistols for Everyone, Everywhere!
The ignorance of state Rep. Ben West Jr. is growing stronger with age.
The evidence of this is abundant, most recently his discussion of plans to introduce a half dozen or so bills that would reduce our already timid handgun laws. We wish all of them—the bills, West, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which backs this sort of stuff—a speedy political demise.
West, who keeps a handgun in the door of his truck, didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. The son of a well-respected former mayor and brother of a recent mayoral candidate we rather liked, he was elected to the legislature from his Hermitage district in 1984. Mostly a backbencher, he never really did much harm.
During the income tax debate several years ago, West embraced the horn honkers. It was more than just a hug. West was on talk radio, he was holding anti-income tax meetings in his district, he was proselytizing against the levy like no other. A Democrat, West’s comments were on par with the most extreme, anti-tax Republicans.
Year after year, West has dropped bills in the hopper that would reduce the restrictions in the state’s handgun laws. Year after year, these bills have been torpedoed in a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. But a funny thing happened this election—five of the 12 members of the Judiciary Committee were defeated. And so West hopes his bills may have new life. In the state Senate, meanwhile, he says state Sen. Doug Jackson probably will be co-sponsoring the bills.
The context for the debate over handguns is this: Before 1994, handgun ownership was largely left to individual police departments. In Davidson County, for instance, if you wanted to carry a handgun, you were “commissioned” to do so by the police department. Importantly, the issue of who could legally carry a handgun—and who could not—was left to law enforcement.
But in the mid-’90s, the NRA undertook a national campaign to remove law enforcement from the picture. In 1994, for instance, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a law allowing anyone to get a handgun permit so long as they passed a basic background check, took a gun safety class and didn’t have a felony conviction. There were other provisions in the law primarily restricting where permit holders couldn’t carry concealed weapons—schools, bars and so on.
Numerous other states around the country passed similar permitting laws. But the NRA has now embarked on a national campaign to remove the handgun restrictions written into those laws when they first passed. “The NRA goal—and they’re up front about this—is to let just about anybody buy a gun and carry that gun where they want to,” says Luis Tolley, director of state legislation for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “That means bars, sports stadiums, day care centers, anywhere.”
Just what West ultimately will propose for Tennessee is not completely clear, but he says he wants to remove the restrictions on having concealed guns in state parks and places that serve alcohol. He says the jury’s still out about what to do with schools.
Perhaps even worse, West says he’ll introduce a measure to make the lists of gun permit holders secret. Such information is typically public record—anyone can go to the appropriate government agency and get the list of people who can carry concealed guns. But the NRA is no doubt worried about how it will look if, because of lax standards, a maniac is issued a permit and then commits a crime with the gun. If the list is kept secret, then no one will ever know he had the permit in the first place.
People have every right in the world to own guns, to hunt, to blast empty beer cans by the creek. But let’s face it: The NRA is an extreme organization. Placing limits on where concealed handguns can be carried, and making public the names of those who carry them are utterly reasonable ideas—not laws we need to blow out of the water. West, as usual, is simply missing the target.
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