The General Assembly ought to come with a warning label: Watching legislators in action may lead to eye-rolls, head-shakes and muttered oaths of exasperation.
Case in point, last week, when Sen. Jeff Yarbro spoke in support of his bill that would have encouraged the safe storage of guns in vehicles. Not mandated, mind you. Encouraged.
Yarbro said that in the year before the legislature made it legal a decade or so ago for people to leave their guns in unoccupied cars, 56 weapons were reported stolen from vehicles. By 2022, that number had risen to more than 5,000 thefts.
In Nashville alone, vehicles provide a ready source of free arsenals for crooks, with 1,203 weapons reported stolen from them in 2023. And who knows how many thefts go unreported.
“This is a problem that, in many ways, has been created,” Yarbro told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And we helped create it. We have created a source of illegal guns in the community, and we know that it has led to people being shot and killed.”
Previous efforts to set a penalty for failing to securely store guns in cars or boats have failed, including a bill last year by Yarbro that would have made violation a Class C misdemeanor, the most minor of offenses. It got nowhere.
“This bill creates no penalty, it authorizes no penalty,” he told committee members, lesson learned. “It’s purely a carrot-based approach. There’s no sticks involved.”
Instead, for counties with populations of around 100,000, the bill would have authorized “local governments to regulate the storage of a firearm in a motor vehicle when the motor vehicle is unoccupied.” The “carrot” was immunity against civil liability for people who complied with the rules if their guns were still stolen.
“So if there’s no stick, they’re just going to ignore the ordinance, right?” asked Sen. Paul Rose.
Bear in mind, this is a legislative body that – as I mentioned above – won’t abide sticks when it comes to gun measures. I don’t know what Yarbro’s frustration level was at this point, but as I watched the proceedings on video, mine was definitely on the upswing.
Then Sen. Todd Gardenhire, the committee chairman, put on a one-man performance. In a presentation complete with props – a hammer, a bolt-cutter, a jemmy and a beeping gun-storage box – he argued how simple it is for a seasoned thief to outmaneuver any efforts to keep a gun in a vehicle safe from theft.
At this point a reasonable person might have thought: Then why did you guys make it so easy to steal guns from cars to begin with? The thought apparently did not occur to Gardenhire before or after he opened his mouth. Then he said this:
“Shouldn’t we try to produce some kind of law that punishes the people who break into a car and not try to punish or embarrass or anything else a law-abiding citizen that has a gun and thinks they’ve got it securely in their car?”
A few observations here. First, I think we can agree that there are laws to punish people who steal guns, provided they can be caught. And, as Yarbro repeated, “I’m not trying to punish any law-abiding gun owners in this legislation.” He also noted that in many cases the thefts are even less complicated than Gardenhire suggested, because people fail to lock their car doors.
Then Yarbro gave voice to that thought of reasonable people:
“If it’s so impossible for us to let firearms be safely in vehicles ... I think that begs the question why we authorized it in the first place.”
Yes. What he said. But it made, and will make, no difference on this topic. Trying to get legislators to fix or undo something stupid they’ve done is even harder than getting them not to do something stupid in the first place.
It’s enough to make you ... well, you know.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.