Guns And Commonsense

Monday, September 8, 2025

“A new law will require all public and charter school students in Tennessee to learn firearm safety….Tenn. Code Ann. § 49-6-1016 passed during the 2024 session, making Tennessee the first state to enact such a law.”  This is the most sensical response to demands for so-called gun control I have seen – ever.

You need the background here.  Tennessee has very, very few gun laws.  They take the second amendment quite seriously and literally here.  In 2023 Nashville suffered one of those now seemingly common school shoot ’em ups, and in its wake governmental chaos ensued – a very small cadre of very liberal legislators lead protesters into the chamber from the streets and hijacked a legislative session.  It was weird and it was ugly.  It is not like the Tennessee legislature was contemplating complete inaction – they just were not contemplating the actions the numbskulls wanted.  Among the actions they did take was the law mentioned in the opening paragraph.

ATF – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  Although the history that lead to the agency and its activities is mostly a story of taxation, specifically the so-called “sin taxes,” these three things have much in common in other senses.  All three are ubiquitous and all three are dangerous when misused, but not so much when used properly.  We learned, the hard way in Prohibition, that banning then simply does not work – it creates a black market far worse than anything witnessed when it was legal.  And so we try to control them, within reason and with constant debate about how much and personal freedoms.

The ill effects of tobacco use are now well and universally known.  There has been a concerted effort since the 1960’s to educate the public about them.  Tobacco use has been declining fairly steadily.  But there have never been serious efforts to ban it outright – mostly because everyone knows the political kickback on such efforts would be as horrific as it was during Prohibition.

So the real question is why do we think it would be any different when it comes to firearms?  Why do some people think stunts like hijacking a legislative session are legit in this circumstances? Why is a tobacco-like approach, which is what the gun-safety training requirement is, inadequate to these people?  Firearms are so ubiquitous in this nation that efforts to ban them would create an enormous, and lethal, black market.  California’s legalization of marijuana has massively increased the black market because it has so heavily regulated and taxed the legal sales, that no one wants to mess with it.  You start regulating guns too heavily and the same thing is going to happen.

Tennessee is to be applauded for this commonsense approach to dealing with the issue.  There is no “solution.”  There are only steps in the right direction, and this is one of them.

Recommended: My email devotional this morning.