Reporting from Murfreesboro, Tenn. — Like many Tennesseans, Mary Beth Sauls supports the right to bear arms. But as she sat by a public pool full of splashing kids recently, the 54-year-old grandmother said she was worried about a new state law that may soon allow gun-permit holders to carry their weapons into city parks like this one.
"I don't think this should really be a place for guns, with all these children around," said Sauls, as she watched a grandson competing in a swim meet.
The Tennessee law, which takes effect Sept. 1, is the latest in a nationwide push by gun-rights advocates to tear down the legal walls that have prevented permit holders from packing their weapons into previously forbidden territory.
In May, Congress voted to allow guns in America's national parks. A number of similar bills were introduced in state legislatures this year to allow guns in parks, bars, college campuses and churches.
In Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city 40 minutes southeast of Nashville, the guns-in-parks law has emerged as a test of how far even a deeply conservative community will go to uphold gun rights. The law allows local governments to opt out and keep their parks gun-free -- a move that the City Council will consider today.
Some residents, like Henry Banks, 58, said they had seen enough "crazy adults" at children's sporting events to support the ban.
"I don't want to go to a park and have somebody who gets hotheaded pull a gun on me," Banks said.
On the other side are Second Amendment purists, such as Adam Johnson, a 26-year-old Target employee who keeps a tattered copy of the Constitution in his pocket; the document, he notes, states that the right to bear arms "shall not be infringed."
"It's pretty unambiguous," he said.
In recent years, gun-rights advocates have stepped up efforts to expand the list of places where permit holders may legally roam with a gun.
This year, Idaho, Montana and Utah joined eight other states in passing laws that allow employees to take loaded guns onto employers' property so long as the weapons are left in locked vehicles, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a leading gun-control advocacy group.
Bills introduced in 12 states this year would have allowed guns on college campuses, though none became law (a 13th bill, in Michigan, is pending). Another failed bill, in Arkansas, sought to let permit-holders carry weapons in churches.
