Did you realize that the concept of self-defense is not seen by the Tennessee Legislature as a fundamental, God-given right?  Did you know that according to the Tennessee Legislature the need to use a firearm to defend your life, the life of your family or even the lives of school children is simply a "recreational" activity?  No wonder Tennessee's gun laws are horrendous!

The state of Tennessee operates on two premises that are important for Tennesseans to know and to force the Legislature to change.

First, Tennessee’s Legislature operates under the theory that there is no right of self-defense in Tennessee. The Tennessee Attorney General wrote in a formal opinion issued in 1996 that the concept of self-defense in Tennessee is created by statute which means that the Legislature can amend, revise or delete it if desired.

In Attorney General Opinion 96-079 (April 24, 1996), the Attorney General wrote:

Most Tennesseans believe that there is a God-given, natural, fundamental human right to defend our lives, the lives of our families, and even our homes.

In Tennessee, the “government” has manipulated our laws to “allow” us in its absolute discretion to raise as an affirmative defense to the charge of homicide or perhaps assault with a deadly weapon that such criminal act was “justified” in an effort to avert an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to an otherwise innocent victim. The Legislature can and has from time to time changed the circumstances of when and how you are “allowed” to defend your life and to possibly avoid a criminal conviction for doing so.

Another premise that the State of Tennessee, including the Legislature, the Department of Safety, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and also including the Tennessee Sheriffs’ Association and the Tennessee Association of Chiefs of Police appear to embrace is that mere citizens have no fundamental right to defend their lives, the lives of their spouses, or the children (much less their property) by carrying a firearm for self-defense – even on their own property!

Tennessee first passed a handgun permit law in 1994. It was amended in several major respects from 1994-1997 but it has been amended by the Legislature almost annually since then. Many Tennesseans think that the Second Amendment means that they have a constitutional right to carry a firearm for self defense. The state of Tennessee and many of its law enforcement organizations disagree – as we have seen over and over and over.

The State’s disregard of the rights of citizens to be armed for self-defense is exemplified in a 1997 amendment to the handgun permit law that is contained in Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-1351. At that time, an amendment was offered in the House of Representatives to some legislation that was otherwise addressing the handgun permit law. (See, 1997 Tennessee Laws Pub. Ch. 476)). That amendment contains this language and remains part of the law to this day (as originally enacted it was in subsection “W” but it was moved later to subsection “V”:

A few years later, the State Attorney General was asked to address this statutory language. In  Attorney General Opinion 02-002, the Attorney General concluded that it was the intent of the Legislature in adding this language to the handgun permit law to classify the Tennessee handgun permit as a “recreational license” so that it could be suspended or cancelled if the permit holder fell behind in child support payments.

It is not certain whether the Legislature actually intended to classify a victim, who is carrying a handgun pursuant to the Tennessee handgun permit law and who uses that handgun in justifiable self-defense and kills an attacker, as someone who was engaged in a recreational activity, but that is certainly what the Legislature did and how the Attorney General (at least as of 2002) viewed the law.

The very fact that the Tennessee statutes have such a warped and corrupted construction of what most Tennesseans view as fundamental civil rights – rights to engage in self-defense and the rights to carry a firearm for self-defense – is part of the problem that we still see today. As a result of these types of problems, Tennessee, it Legislature and many of its law enforcement agencies simply do not embrace the principle that citizens have rights that pre-exist the State and that the State has no power or authority to “infringe” those rights by statutes, regulations or orders.

It is important that Tennesseans understand the existence of this problem because it is one of the likely reasons why Tennessee’s Governors, its Legislators and its primary law enforcement agencies refuse to adopt or embrace REAL constitutional carry in Tennessee. Most of the government actors will never understand or embrace the existence of the citizens’ fundamental rights and move to remove the infringements that state law creates until those government actors realize that the citizens are ready to remove them from their “Mount Olympus” that vests them with perceived power and authority over the rights of the people of this state to be free of unconstitutional infringements.

TFALAC conducts a statewide annual dinner and gun auction event normally in September.  This year it will be on September 9 in Lebanon, Tennessee.   Sponsorships, vendor opportunities, tables and individual tickets are available now.