Article from Reason by Noah Shepardson.

Convicted felons can now possess guns in the Volunteer State.

The catch? The guns have to be so old they don’t technically count as firearms under state law. That also means they’d probably be pretty useless in terms of self-defense.

Earlier this year, the state legislature unanimously passed legislation that amended Tennessee’s definition as to what constitutes a firearm in order to make the state’s definition the same as the federal government’s. Notably, the federal government doesn’t consider “antique weapons”—by which the government means guns manufactured prior to 1899—to be firearms. That means, by extension, Tennessee now doesn’t either.

State law previously denied felons—including individuals convicted of nonviolent drug offenses—the right to own any firearms, including those classified as antique. However, Tennessee’s reaffirmation of a felon’s right to own an outdated, ineffective weapon does little to address the fact that nonviolent drug offenders are still being denied their Constitutional right to self-defense in the state.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By KAZ Vorpal (Flickr: Declaration of Independence, with Firearm) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons