The new legislative session won’t start in earnest for a couple of weeks, yet legislators already have assured us they have their priorities backward and are dead set on bucking community values, police chiefs and effective law enforcement.
One of the Legislature’s top priorities is to rewrite the controversial guns-in-bars act that it adopted last year to circumvent a chancery court opinion that threw out the law after finding it was unconstitutionally vague. Another priority is to make it virtually impossible for cities to use cameras to help reduce speeding and other traffic violations.
This is the Legislature that not too many years ago made our state a national laughingstock by adopting the infamous “road-kill bill.” That bill allowed passersby to take dead game animals found on the highway home for dinner or their freezers without having legally killed them through licensed hunting. Why add to that dismal legacy?
The guns-in-bars bill not only was fatally flawed; most Tennesseans are also against it. Two polls have now shown that. The latest, commissioned by the Tennessee Hospitality Association, was conducted before the court’s ruling reinforced poll respondents’ feeling that it was, and remains, a bad law.
Association CEO Walt Baker told a Tennessean reporter that the THA membership opposed the law and commissioned the poll to see how Tennesseans felt. And, in fact, the poll, which evenly split its queries of registered voters who voted in the last election between Republicans, Democrats and independents, found that 67 percent of respondents opposed the law. It also found that 90 percent of those polled thought property owners’ rights should take precedence over gun owners rights.
Neither legislators nor Mr. Baker could have been surprised by the strong opposition against the guns-in-bars law. A similar poll released by Middle Tennessee State University in October also found that 60 percent of Tennesseans opposed allowing patrons to carry guns, concealed or not, into restaurants and bars that serve alcohol.
Indeed, the majority of Tennesseans have good reason to believe it’s dangerous to allow gun-toting patrons to carry their guns into bars and restaurants, even if the gun-carrier is not supposed to drink while carrying a gun. The law is fraught with problems. It gives restaurants and bars of a prescribed larger size the right to allow gun-carrying customers, so long as they don’t imbibe alcohol, and it gives these businesses the right to disallow guns and post signs that forbid gun-carry.
But it doesn’t specify how patrons would know which size restaurant or bar they were trying to enter, or what owners and waiters could do to determine if customers were carrying guns and were not entitled to order alcohol. It also leaves owners with nightmare liability if they fail to determine whether customers are carrying guns (and/or drinking) and someone is wrongly shot as a result.
Legislators are inanely blasé about such issues, as well as Tennesseans’ opposition to the law for fear of mixing alcohol with guns. Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, says he is not worried about problems with the law or the public opposition expressed in the polls. He supports a rewrite which, according to state Sen. Doug Jackson, would eliminate vagueness by making it legal to carry a gun into any place that serves alcohol.
But forcing bar and restaurant owners to allow gun-possession in their businesses is wrong in every aspect. It’s also idiocy as a public policy. It caters to the less-than-five percent of Tennesseans who have a gun-carry permit. It tramples owners’ and other patrons rights and disregards mindful public policy and the expert opinion of police chiefs across the state. It’s an invitation to needless bloodshed and a recipe for disaster.
Exercising the same sort of maddeningly myopic mindset, legislators who have been looking into municipal use of traffic cameras seem to have been swept away by opponents who claim the use of cameras to inhibit speeding and running red lights amounts mainly to fee-grabbing.
They are sadly wrong on that score. Municipal experience shows that traffic cameras target scofflaws, and leave law-abiding citizens alone.
In fact, even if they were intended partly to build municipal revenue, that would be fine as long as they hold down speeding and reckless driving, particularly through traffic lights. What, indeed, could be wrong with that if they save on police manpower and simultaneously improve public safety?
Speeders will learn to slow down, and eventually they’ll quit shouting about having their propensity to speed restricted in favor of public safety. They would have to start acting like responsible adults, or pay through the nose.
If we could come up with a similar device to motivate legislators to act like adults and give priority attention to public safety instead of pandering to the NRA agenda and a perceived public bias for guns and speeding, gun crime and reckless driving might actually recede.