E.G. Smith gathered with his son, daughter and some family friends recently to shoot skeet at the Nashville Gun Club’s complex off County Hospital Road.
“It’s just a thing you do, like fishing,” Smith said.
Smith, 60, also owns guns for self-defense at his home in Pegram. And as a woodworker, he thinks some weapons, loaded or not, are just plain “pretty.”
His attitude highlights the problems some Southern politicians — Southern Democrats, to be precise — have when they try to handle the political hot potato of gun control.
Northern officials such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg feel comfortable blistering the airwaves with denunciations of easily accessible firearms and calls for greater restrictions in the wake of the mass shooting of children and teachers in Newtown, Conn.
But Southern politicos tend to tread much more carefully in their language and stances.
“It’s always a huge problem for Southern Democrats if they take a liberal position on guns,” said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta and longtime student of Southern politics. “They’ve already got a huge problem with the white vote in the South. They know it’s a vote-loser among whites who feel strongly about the issue.”
A Gallup poll in October 2011 found gun ownership was more common in the South than in any other region of the country, with 54 percent of households owning at least one gun. The Midwest was next, at 51 percent, followed by the West, at 43 percent, and the East, at 36 percent.
Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has been an ally of Bloomberg’s on issues such as volunteerism and immigration reform. But he has shied away from joining Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization the New York chief executive founded six years ago.
A Dean spokeswoman told The Tennessean in December that the mayor’s “focus remains on local issues, including public safety as one of his top priorities.”
Left unsaid was the fact that Dean is a Democrat who could run for statewide office someday and probably wants to keep his options open. And he isn’t alone.
The mayors of Charlotte and Indianapolis also have declined to joinMayors Against Illegal Guns, though the leaders of most comparable cities, including Atlanta; Memphis; Louisville, Ky.; and Raleigh, N.C., are members of the coalition.
Guns not problem
Ray Hopkins, owner of Shooter’s Guns and Ammo on Murfreesboro Pike, said guns are not the problem.
“You have people out there with mental issues,” Hopkins said. “If they want to kill somebody, they’ll find a way.”
With stricter gun control, “all you’re going to do is keep an honest man from protecting himself and his family,” said Hopkins, adding that about 75 percent of his business comes from people looking to defend themselves.
U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, a Nashville Democrat, said Nashville has a First Amendment Center but could just as easily have a place honoring the Second Amendment.
“Gun culture pretty much permeates the country in all regions, less so in urban areas but certainly all over rural America,” Cooper said. “There are gun opponents and gun advocates pretty much everywhere. I do think there are probably more gun control people in cities, but it’s hard to generalize. I can introduce you to plenty of Nashvillians of both stripes.”
Cooper said repeatedly that, as a lawmaker, he’s bound to follow the U.S. Constitution as it’s interpreted by the Supreme Court. He noted that the court has held twice in recent years that the Second Amendment guarantees “an individual right to bear arms,” though some critics say that’s a misreading.
“Legislators are hemmed in by the Constitution, as we should be,” Cooper said. “We could have an endless legal discussion over the history of the Second Amendment and things like that. … I’m willing to consider any proposal to keep kids safe. The proposals that have a chance of passing and a chance of working will be constitutional ones.”
“I don’t get to vote on ideas, I don’t get to vote on feelings,” he said. “I get to vote on pieces of legislation.”
-Michael Cass, The Tennessean
