Tennessee Firearms Association Founder John Harris Tracks the 55 Second Amendment Bills Filed for 2022’s General Assembly

Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed John Harris, founder of the Tennessee Firearms Association, to the newsmaker line to discuss the nature of bills that he is tracking for 2022.

Leahy: Now on the newsmaker line by our very good friend, the Founder and President of the Tennessee Firearms Association, John Harris. Good morning, John.

Harris: Good morning.

Leahy: And let me also add that you are the co-author, along with Claudia Henneberry and me of the Guide of the Constitution: Bill of Rights for Secondary School Students. That’s the supplemental text that we use as the standard for the National Constitution Bee.

We will be holding the 6th National Constitution Bee for students in grades eight through 12 coming up on October 22nd in Brentwood. Five thousand dollars to the second-place winner, $10,000 to the first place winner educational scholarship.

So thank you for that work as well. Now tell me, do you have your report card, your interim report card, out to grade the Tennessee General Assembly on Second Amendment issues?

Harris: The great thing is I can report that they’re consistent because they’re doing about a job this year as they’ve done in the past 12 years.

Leahy: You are always a ray of sunshine, John, (Laughter) when it comes to you holding the Tennessee General Assembly, you hold their feet to the fire on Second Amendment issues. By the way, before we get into this, tell people about the Tennessee Firearms Association and how it differs from other National Second Amendment organizations.

Harris: The Tennessee Firearms Association is a non-profit. Its board, and its executive officers, including myself, are all volunteers. We don’t get paid for the work. What we were initially set up to focus on almost exclusively was monitoring and working with the legislature to pass good, strong pro-Second Amendment legislation.

And for the first 16 years of our existence, we were helping to pass successfully good, strong Second Amendment legislation under a Democrat-controlled General Assembly and governor because we were working with conservative rural Democrats like John Mark Windle, a House member from the Cookeville area, and Republicans who were in the minority at the time.

And then we believed and hoped that when the Republicans got the majority, as they promised they would, we would see bluebirds and rainbows and blue skies when it comes to the Second Amendment in Tennessee starting in 2010.

And really what we’ve seen is hailstorms and bad weather. But our focus has been that working with the General Assembly and in the last 10 years, we have increasingly expended time and resources, working with the Second Amendment Foundation and Gun Owners of America on filing briefs in the federal court systems on issues like bump stocks, deregulation of suppressors, and things of that sort.

We’ve started doing a lot of additional work in the area of public interest litigation, again with working with attorneys, including myself, who donate their time to that effort.

Leahy: What are the big issues that you’re looking at right now in this session of the Tennessee General Assembly?

Harris: We’re tracking 55 bills that are actually filed and moving this year.

Leahy: There are 55 bills on Second Amendment issues under consideration?

Harris: Oh yes. There are red flag laws. There are bills to try to define gun violence as a public health issue, as opposed to the ability of the government to regulate or control crime. But there’s good stuff like extending the sales tax holiday on gun safes.

But there are some pretty high-profile bills that are getting a ton of resistance from the so-called pro-Second Amendment Republicans or some of them. It’s really the RINOs and some of the moderates.

And so, for example, there’s a bill by Representative Jerry Sexton that we think very highly of that would actually adopt true constitutional carry in Tennessee.

And it simply deletes one sentence out of our code. There’s a sentence in our existing statutes that says it’s a crime for a citizen to carry a firearm with the intent to go armed. His bill deletes that.

Leahy: Now let’s go back to that part of the code again. Read that sentence again, because I didn’t quite grasp exactly what that sentence means.

Harris: Under our statutes, 39-17-1307 A1, we have a single sentence that says it’s a crime for an individual to carry a firearm with the intent to go armed, period. It’s literally one size.

Leahy: But hold it. I don’t understand what that means. Carry a firearm with the intent to go armed. What exactly does that mean?

Harris: Well the courts do not have much case law on it, and it’s been on the books for almost 200 years. But the courts have basically said if you’re carrying a firearm with either offensive or defensive intent to either use it or to defend yourself with it, that’s the intent to go armed. And that’s a crime.

Leahy: That seems very bizarre in terms of language to me.

Harris: It is an in Tennessee is an anomaly. We’re one of only a handful of states that have that kind of language. Most states, their laws have said for two centuries that you can carry a firearm openly, and that’s not a crime at all.

But if you wanted to conceal it, you had to go get a permit. That’s where the nomenclature concealed weapons permit actually came from. Tennessee has been even more restrictive and, in fact, was cited in the Supreme Court just last fall as perhaps the most restrictive state in the nation, having the longest history of oppressing citizens by making it a crime to carry a firearm in any manner or context with the intent to go armed.

Leahy: What are the prospects for that bill?

Harris: Last year, so many legislators championed the fact that they thought they had passed constitutional carry. So we thought we would serve them up a bill that actually does it. And the bill actually got a fiscal note that says it’ll save the state about $2 million a year.

We’ve got a great Senate sponsor on the bill. I think it’s Senator Bailey. Jerry Sexton is a fantastic House sponsor. We do have some good support but the silence is coming out of House leadership. We’re not seeing Speaker Sexton support the bill or say anything about it.

We didn’t expect Lieutenant Governor McNally to support it because he didn’t really support the one last year. We think if the bill gets to the floor it has a great chance of passage. What we’re concerned about is will they somehow try to kill it in the subcommittee system.

Leahy: John, let me ask you this question. In the Tennessee general assembly, really the two powers are the Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally and the Speaker of the House Cam Sexton.

Do you sit down and have coffee with them and say hey at the beginning of a session, Speaker Sexton, these are our priorities. We would really appreciate your help. Do you have that level of communication with them?

Harris: We did in fact meet and actually had dinner with Speaker Sexton between last year and this year and went over it with him. It was just the TFA’s board members and the Speaker with what we’d like to see where we’d like to go.

And in fact, we’ve drafted a couple of bills based almost entirely on his recommendations in terms of who the sponsor was, how it was written, everything. And it’s already been killed in a subcommittee this year.

So it doesn’t appear that he supported it. Off the record in the caucus, he did not sign on to it as a co-sponsor. But we did extend that effort.

Leahy: He had dinner with you. That’s a good sign, right?

Harris: Yes. We’ve tried to extend the same kind of effort to talk with Lieutenant Governor McNally. He’s just not showing any interest at all.

Leahy: Well, Lieutenant Governor McNally, John Harris is a nice guy. Have dinner with him and talk a little bit about the legislative agenda.

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.