The capacity of the typical politician to avoid meaningful reform in gun law is remarkable. Truthwire's Colson Potter investigates just how remarkable it is....
Being a Republican in a Republican-strong state like Tennessee can foster a certain sense of complacency. Sure, we have our issues, but we’re good on some issues, like guns. Right? Well, not quite right. Tennessee gun laws aren’t terrible, but they have definite weak points, weak points Establishment politicians like State Senator Jack Johnson are uninterested in addressing. In fact, the capacity of the typical politician to avoid meaningful reform in gun law is remarkable.
Tennessee is a Constitutional Carry state. As such, outside of certain exceptions, law-abiding Tennesseans can carry guns openly without permits. Well, not guns in general—handguns only. Don’t try it with a rifle. Long guns aren’t part of ‘Constitutional carry,’ as presumably the legislature can tell that ‘arms’ in the two constitutions actually just means pistols. And those exceptions? Besides prohibitions based on private property rights and Federal law, Constitutional carry doesn’t hold in schools, parks with ongoing public events, or establishments serving alcohol. Well, that was the case until August 2025, when the judiciary, not the legislature, got rid of that 150-year-old law, at least in certain circumstances (such as public parks), though the ruling still has some procedural hurdles to clear before we can rely on it fully. As the court recognized, those laws simply weren’t Constitutional.
These holes in our Constitutional Carry laws were still thoroughly in force last legislative session, regardless of the ongoing litigation. Perhaps a strong 2nd Amendment advocate, like Sen. Johnson claims he is, might have been working on the problems? Even now, the State Senate Majority Leader should have some pull to help get the decision past the procedural difficulties still hanging over its head. But no; Sen. Johnson had bigger fish to fry: SB1296, a bill making it a crime to threaten mass violence or post certain publicly available personal information online with an “intent to cause harm or a threat of harm.” This bill is very dubious under current 1st Amendment law. More importantly, it implies that Sen. Johnson and his ilk think that laws regulating speech (not action) are more important than protecting a fundamental part of American rights, the right to bear arms.
Holes in Constitutional Carry aren’t the only 2A problem in Tennessee’s current law. The manufacture of guns is obviously an integral part of 2nd Amendment rights, as I can’t bear arms unless there are arms to bear. In reflection of this, laws preventing the private manufacture of firearms were not part of the original design and understanding of our societies. Nowadays, serial numbers on commercially produced guns are standard, like it or not. Up until recently, home-made firearms (3D print or kit) weren’t subject to that same requirement. Tennessee implemented that restriction in the past two years.
Should 2nd Amendment champions be instating laws to restrict Americans’ capacity to make guns? It seems difficult to argue, and Senator Johnson doesn’t, preferring to point to other achievements- like a permitless carry act (which doesn’t apply to long guns) and a law to reduce financial tracking of firearms (a strange bedfellow for the legislature’s increased restrictions on gun manufacture). He also proposed and successfully passed SB1075 this last session.
SB1075 initially appears an innocuous if mildly inane bill adding 5 days to the time allowed in certain governmental processes. SB1075 is, as it turns out, a ‘caption’ bill: its real meat only showed up after being amended. As amended and enacted, the law expands the definition of a machine gun, increases the penalties for extralegal possession of a machine gun, and more. This re-definition causes issues in a legal realm, as John Harris of the Tennessee Firearm Association points out, due to dissonance with federal law.
The other issue is the question of why Sen. Johnson is more interested in reducing the room left by government regulation for gun-owners than in protecting gun owners from increased regulations. He manifestly prefers to increase penalties for violating gun laws rather than maintain our right to keep and bear arms. Besides, how are regulations on machine gun ownership Constitutional? The Founders did not live in a country which banned private citizens from owning cannons (or any other type of gun), so long as they could afford it. How does Sen. Johnson, a professed conservative, think it Constitutional to enact laws which (nearly) ban machine guns?
With all this talk of the federal 2nd Amendment, we should acknowledge that Tennessee’s own constitution is significantly weaker on the matter than the federal Constitution. Whereas the 2nd Amendment withholds all legislative power from the federal government and all governments within its borders (including Tennessee), the Tennessee constitution states, “[T]he citizens of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms with a view to prevent crime.”
As you can imagine, this provision is a ready excuse when the legislature wants a pretext for regulating guns. Sure, we can go to the 2nd Amendment and hope the federal courts are our friends, but Tennesseans should not need to go to the federal government. HJR0053, proposed in the 2025 legislative session, sought to give Tennesseans that home-grown barrier, another and more local bulwark against tyranny. The proposal, assuming it passed the legislature and the popular vote, would remove the second half of the previously quoted section, with its grant of power, from the Tennessee constitution.
Senator Johnson, apparently, is not interested in the topic. While HJR0053 came from the House, by the hand of Rep. Jay Reedy, and it is unclear to me whether senators had the capacity to co-sponsor it at the stage it reached (though joint resolutions can be co-sponsored by senators), Senator Johnson must have been aware of it. Certainly any champion of the 2nd Amendment would have heard the news. Honestly, the idea itself is not hard to come up with; a Senate Majority leader like Johnson could surely have conceived of and executed it, kept it from dying in committee like HJR0053.
Instead, Sen. Johnson put forward SB1082. SB1082 gives a list of crimes for which the criminal being armed acts as an included charge (pardon me if the precisely legal language is off; the law is 99% legalese). On the surface, this bill seems to be a rather unremarkable bit of legislation. It is not. Harris summarizes one of the problems with the bill as follows: “[U]nder the legislation if the individual had a firearm in their possession… such that it qualified under the “intent to go armed” clause[,] then a person committing a nonviolent felony which the state established was reckless but not either intentional nor knowing would be sentenced from 3 to 10 years in prison even if the normal consequence of the sentencing statutes called for no prison time at all for the underlying crime.” In other words, a crime of recklessness- not of intent- would become a 3-10 year jail sentence because of a gun which need not have even been involved in the crime, which the criminal might have forgotten he was in possession of at the moment.
Overall, Senator Johnson’s 2nd Amendment record is the picture of a politician: do stuff that looks good on the resume (but often a lot worse in person), ignore the really worthwhile causes, and call yourself a champion of the people. But does a champion ignore those worthwhile causes? Does a 2nd Amendment champion prefer to increase restrictions on guns? Or does he work towards removing restrictions, towards aligning the current laws with the freer state which the Constitution mandates?
I’ll let you answer that one.
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