The Tennessee House of Representatives has approved a bill that criminalizes shooting guns into the air (as well as the ground or any body of water) where groups of 25 or more people are present; legislation that was prompted by the death of a 61-year-old man last Independence Day, who was struck by a falling round while out on a walk with his spouse and several friends.
This sounds like a pretty common sense piece of legislation, right? In fact, the bill passed the state Senate unanimously, but the measure encountered unexpected resistance in the House, which actually rejected the bill on April 21 after a significant number of House Republicans balked at the language.
Rep. Monty Fritts, R-Kingston, said he opposed the bill because it would “add something else even more complex” to the “current complexity of our gun law.”
“I had spent some time in the Middle East and that’s a cultural thing for some of those people who aren’t very smart — that they shoot up in the air and those rounds do come down,” Fritts said.
Rep. Todd Warner, R-Chapel Hill, shared concerns that the bill could impact turkey shoots. House sponsor Rep. Iris Rudder, R-Winchester, clarified that it would have no impact on turkey shoots, because it would only apply to celebratory events. Warner voted against the bill.
The House sponsor was able to bring the bill back for consideration the following day, however, and the second time around the House approved HB 1757 on a 63-18 vote, with nine other members voting "present."
In Nashville last Independence Day, four people were wounded by apparently celebratory gunfire during the Let Freedom Sing celebration in downtown, according to Metro Nashville Police. A 60-year-old man was shot in the foot, a 58-year-old woman struck in the chest while waiting for a shuttle on Broadway, a 30-year-old woman shot in the leg on Demonbreun Street, and a 26-year-old woman hit in the face while getting into a rideshare vehicle on First Avenue.
A fifth man, 33, was struck in the leg by a stray bullet while watching fireworks near an apartment complex on Bell Road.
The bill also requires handgun safety courses — which are no longer required to legally carry handguns in Tennessee — to include instruction on the dangers of reckless discharge at public gatherings.
The best argument in voting against the bill is that firing a gun into the air in celebration can already be prosecuted under Tennessee's “reckless endangerment” statute, which is a Class E felony that can carry a penalty of up to six years in prison if a firearm or another deadly weapon is involved. HB 1757, meanwhile, treats the offense as a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by no more than a year behind bars.
Bill sponsor Iris Rudder said after the vote that with the penalties outlined in this bill, her hope is that "individuals will think twice before engaging in such reckless and dangerous behavior.” No offense to the representative, but if the potential of spending six years in prison for shooting a gun into the air on New Year's Eve or the Fourth of July isn't preventing this behavior, why would the possibility of a one-year stint in jail be more compelling?
It's dumb and dangerous to bang away at the sky while ringing in the new year (or at any other time), but I'm genuinely puzzled about why any lawmaker believes this bill is necessary, much less why they would think it will be any more effective than charging offenders with reckless endangerment.
Instead, this seems to be to be a classic example of legislators' need to "do something" in response to a tragedy. John Cobb's death was tragic, as were the injuries suffered by those five individuals in Nashville on the same day that Cobb lost his life. But given that the most likely outcome in prosecuting anyone for this behavior going forward will be a plea deal to a misdemeanor instead of a felony conviction, HB 1757 hardly seems like a substantial response to the actions that led to Cobb's death and the injuries to others.
We also need to remember that it can be difficult to find the offender who fired a gun into the air. No one has been arrested or charged in Cobb's death, and I'd argue that if these crimes are rarely charged to begin with, neither Rudder's bill or the current reckless endangerment statute is going to have much of a deterrent effect.
When I saw the news that the House had rejected HB 1757, only to adopt it the following day, my first thought was "why would anyone be opposed to this?" As I learned more about the current law and the lesser consequences provided by HB 1757, though, I changed my mind. I think there was a good reason to oppose HB 1757, and it has nothing to do with condoning this reckless behavior or claiming the bill is a backdoor gun control measure. HB 1757 can fairly be described as a soft-on-crime bill as far as I'm concerned, and if I served in the Tennessee House I probably would have voted against it too.
