After a decade of systematically loosening our state’s gun laws, the Tennessee General Assembly hit rock bottom in 2021, when it passed permitless carry—a law that most Tennesseans didn’t want and that has made our streets more dangerous.

We need to reverse course. But first we need to talk about how we got here.

Over the last 40 years, millions of Americans have been programmed to be single-issue voters. They’ve been told that it’s their religious duty to vote “pro-life” in every election, large and small.

My mother—the kindest, most compassionate person I’ve ever known—was a single-issue voter. No matter what a candidate was running for, no matter what else they stood for, if they used that magic label, they got her vote.

Mom was part of an army of well-meaning Americans whose “pro-life” votes have been hijacked to push through anti-life policies—policies that benefit special interests, wealthy corporations, and billionaires. A pro-life vote is generally a vote against better access to health care, higher wages, well-funded public schools, cleaner air and water, and basic guardrails to keep guns out of the hands of children, criminals, and unstable people.

That’s how Tennessee got here: An army of single-issue voters voted in every election, large and small, for years and years and years. And a lot of the rest of us did not.

They don’t outnumber us. They outvote us. If we’re going to fix our gun laws, we have to fix that first.

Allison
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