Handguns will continue to be banned from Nashville’s new Ascend Amphitheater — at least for the near future — despite a legal opinion from the state’s top lawyer that seemed to throw the policy in doubt.
Attorney General Herbert Slatery wrote last week that a new state law opens all parks in Tennessee, including venues like Ascend that are run by private companies. That suggests Live Nation, Ascend’s operator, would have to allow guns at the venue’s concerts.
James Bolden, the former police director in Memphis, says the opinion is alarming. If someone were to pull out a gun at a crowded concert, there’d be chaos, he warns.
“We’re setting ourselves up for a disaster of catastrophic proportion,” Bolden says.
Bolden believes only trained officers should have guns around large crowds, and
Metro legal director Saul Solomon generally agrees. But he doesn’t think the Attorney General’s opinion signals as big a change to state law as Bolden suggests.
Solomon argues that when state lawmakers voted to open parks to guns, they were thinking of general uses, such as walking or playing sports. But private
events have long been able to set policies that keep out practically anything — from large bags to glass bottles to selfie
sticks.
“And I don’t really see anything in the statute that disrupted that,” he says.
Solomon says a court would have to look at the question before the city is likely to change its policy for Ascend.
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