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Tennessee's new gun law is a non-issue for restaurant owners
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"In Tennessee, we apparently are going to have 225,000 vigilantes shooting in bars."
That's a quote from Randy Rayburn, a restaurateur in Nashville who's complaining about a new state law that will allow gun owners to carry concealed in establishments that serve alcohol.
Rayburn's hyperventilation over this law is absurd at best, considering he's implying that all of Tennessee's handgun permit holders will turn local bars and restaurants into modern day versions of the O.K. Corral just as soon as they're allowed entrance with their sidearms.
But there are at least a few problems with this argument. For starters, gun owners are among the most responsible people around. Thirty-seven other states have similar laws on their books and they haven't yet devolved into the fabled "Wild West" (a myth in its own right). Furthermore, the Tennessee law prevents bar and restaurant patrons from drinking alcohol when in possession of a firearm. And unlike an Oklahoma law that trampled property rights by requiring employers to allow workers to keep firearms in their cars in company parking lots, restaurant owners in Tennessee still have the right to ban weapons from their establishments.
Admittedly, I don't have my finger on the pulse of Tennessee politics, but this new gun law appears to not only increase liberty for gun owners but also preserve the property rights of business owners. The only problem I could foresee is if the law, say, allowed guns in restaurants but not in bars, and the status of an establishment could actually change in the eyes of the state relative to the amount of food it served in proportion to liquor.
For instance, if a restaurant owner could be fined or closed down because his liquor sales outweighed his food sales at any given point -- in essence, he's a "restaurant" one day and a "bar" the next -- this would obviously be an undue burden. In such a case, it would be virtually impossible to monitor a business in a dynamic environment where transactions are occurring minute to minute, and the owner would never really know whether to admit customers with guns or not. However, this doesn't appear to be a potential issue given that the law seems to apply equally to bars and restaurants.
No public servant should have the right to determine policy for any bar or restaurant owner, whether the issue be carrying a firearm, smoking, or eating fatty foods on the premises. All that matters is that consumers are engaging in consensual transactions with the property owners. Bars, like any other business, should be allowed to determine their own policies and either reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of their stand in the marketplace.
Unless I'm mistaken in assessing this new law, people like Randy Rayburn simply have to post a sign reading "No guns allowed" if they don't want patrons carrying firearms -- the same thing they'd do in the absence of state laws in the first place. If this isn't good enough, then the only conclusion one can reliably draw is that Rayburn is a no-good busybody who wishes to use the state in order to impose his will on everyone else.
