Tennessee Counties Undertake Gun Dispossession Measure After Legislative Delay

Judges throughout Tennessee at the moment are demanding better accountability from individuals who have been ordered to surrender their weapons, a shift geared toward strengthening protections for home violence victims.

The change is being adopted county by county, after state lawmakers bowed to opposition from the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation over a invoice that might have taken that reform statewide.

The transfer follows reporting by WPLN and ProPublica over the previous two years that discovered Tennessee’s lax gun legal guidelines and enforcement have allowed firearms to stay in harmful fingers. The state persistently has one of many highest charges of girls killed by males, and most of these homicides are dedicated with weapons. The information organizations’ evaluation discovered that about 1 in 4 victims of home violence gun homicides had been killed by somebody who was barred from having a firearm.

In Tennessee, when somebody is convicted of a home violence cost or is topic to an order of safety, they aren’t allowed to own a gun. An individual ordered to relinquish their firearm can flip it over to a 3rd occasion, like a good friend or relative, for safekeeping. However the state doesn’t require them to reveal whose fingers the weapon leads to. Advocates say that makes it laborious to make sure that the weapons got up — and that they got to somebody who’s legally allowed to carry on to them.

As a part of its investigation, WPLN and ProPublica reported on an East Tennessee county that had remodeled its justice system for home violence victims. Scott County’s reforms embrace a requirement that when a court docket is stripping home violence abusers of their weapons, they need to inform the court docket in a written affidavit who’s going to take custody of their weapons. The county additionally asks for the tackle of that individual, who’s requested to signal an affidavit saying they’re in receipt of the weapons. None of those additional measures of accountability, nonetheless, are required on the state’s normal gun-dispossession type.

“The [state’s] type is basically incomplete,” stated Becky Bullard with Nashville’s Workplace of Household Security. “We are able to’t have somebody dispossess of their firearm lawfully if we don’t know who they’re giving the gun to.”

At the least 9 counties, together with Tennessee’s two largest, Davidson and Shelby, have amended the state’s gun dispossession affidavit to require details about who will probably be taking possession of the weapon. Different counties are additionally contemplating the change, advocates say.

“After I heard about what Scott County was doing, I used to be shocked,” stated Shelby County Choose Greg Gilbert, who adjusted that court docket’s type when he came upon that courts had been in a position to do this themselves. “It does make it just a little extra seemingly that individuals will take this significantly.”

Final 12 months, two Republican lawmakers launched laws that might have made Scott County’s type the default for the remainder of the state, however the invoice was pushed to 2026 after opposition from the Tennessee Firearms Affiliation and the NRA. Neither affiliation responded to requests for remark on the time. One of many lawmakers who launched the invoice, Sen. Becky Massey, a Knox County Republican, stated she would transfer ahead with the invoice once more if her Home counterpart, Rep. Kelly Keisling, did. However Keisling, a Republican whose district consists of Scott County, stated he’s “unsure as to the way forward for this explicit piece of laws.”

This month, advocates for victims of home violence additionally pushed for a state council on home violence to advocate adoption of the amended type. That effort failed after a procedural mishap; the group plans to revisit the subject at its subsequent assembly in March.

“We actually don’t have a minute to lose. It is a battle that we’ve been preventing round a type for years,” stated Bullard, who has advocated for this reform since a lethal capturing in 2018 at a Waffle Home the place the person traveled with a gun that he was ordered to surrender. “And it may have an effect on somebody within the subsequent minute.”