Gun rights vs. music festivals: How do you keep people safe?

Micheal Evans remembers the pure funk-fueled mayhem. 

It was 2013, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were rocking Piedmont Park at the Music Midtown festival. The crowds massed in Atlanta’s version of Central Park bounced to the California rock band’s beats. Mr. Evans has one enduring memory: It was so much fun.

This year, however, there will be no Music Midtown festival. It was called off when organizers concluded that the recent push to further loosen gun laws created too great a risk for a festival that draws 50,000 revelers a day.

Mr. Evans can understand both sides as a former police officer who at times carries a concealed weapon. “It is all very disappointing.” Though he adds: “Large crowds, alcohol, excited emotions, and guns aren’t necessarily the best mix.”

Beneath the angst about the festival itself is a deeper question about how America views safety – and how that is shifting. Gun rights long have been a matter of balancing a more communal notion of public safety with individuals’ rights to protect themselves.

This summer’s Supreme Court decision bolstered the individuals, saying the Constitution holds that law-abiding citizens can carry concealed weapons nationwide. Cities and states are now sorting new political and policy priorities in light of the ruling, and the cancellation of the Midtown Music festival is part of that. It points to how communities are recalibrating how they can best feel safe in the new legal environment. 

“We are ... at a crossroads of what it means to have a constitutional, individual right to bear arms with the need to secure the community and provide for public safety,” says Amy Steigerwalt, a political scientist at Georgia State University in Atlanta. 

Atlanta’s struggle

Music Midtown has come to define Atlanta’s ascension as a cultural beacon in the South. The city has joined the echelon of top music cities, with festivals to rival New York, Los Angeles and, yes, even Nashville a few hours to the north.

But Atlanta has also seen a scourge of gun violence, often in public places. In 2021, at least six rappers and one music producer were killed by gunfire here.

“We’re grappling with the reality of changed laws around guns,” says Doug Shipman, president of Atlanta’s City Council. “So, how do you think about large gatherings? How do you think about keeping people safe?”

To some in the gun rights debate, the Supreme Court ruling might not change things as much as some believe – at least in states that already had so-called constitutional carry laws.

“This might seem new to people ... but I think they have probably been to events where people have been carrying and they just didn’t know about it,” says John Monroe, a gun rights attorney in Dawsonville, Georgia. “People carry guns all over the place. You see them in the grocery store, you see them in restaurants. It’s part of life around here in Georgia.” 

Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP/File

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signs a law that allows permitless carry in Douglasville, Georgia, on April 12, 2022. Georgia SB 319 allows a “lawful weapons carrier” to carry a concealed handgun everywhere in the state licensed holders currently are allowed.

The state legislature passed a major expansion of gun rights back in 2014. Other venues and festivals have adjusted, Mr. Monroe says. Some have banned “illegal weapons” – though it is hard for police to determine which weapons are legal and which are not.

The question of where the line of public safety should be drawn is always shifting. United States law long focused on public safety as a state interest that can be used to justify banning guns or requiring seat belts, for instance. In this summer’s so-called Bruen ruling, the Supreme Court flipped the script, in essence minimizing the idea that the state has an overriding interest in public safety. 

Yet the ruling “does recognize that there are certain places that constitutional carry doesn’t apply – schools, courthouses, the state Capitol – and of course that brings up a question: Why?” says Professor Steigerwalt at Georgia State. “We have these tensions and questions of, what ... does it mean to be safe?”

A shifting landscape

The decision to cancel the festival was a product of that uncertain landscape. Local gun rights activist Phil Evans threatened to sue the festival if it did not allow guns. He had already taken one lawsuit to the state supreme court, challenging his removal from Piedmont Park’s Botanical Gardens in 2014 for wearing a weapon. 

That legal challenge failed, but the threat was enough to persuade Music Midtown’s organizers to cancel. 

It’s no surprise that these questions have come to the fore in Atlanta.

“The state has been a civil rights hotspot since the founding of the republic: for racial equality, in the fight for abortion rights, and now it is the civil rights hotspot for the Second Amendment,” says Timothy Lytton, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University. 

Today, that is overlaid with elements of entertainment culture, as well. 

“You have the thriving, musically leading city of Atlanta that has become the cultural capital of the South and the hip-hop center of the United States,” he adds.  

The cancellation of Music Midtown sets up “a culture clash between people whose No. 1 issue is firearms rights and people whose No. 1 issue is building a cultural center around music festivals, which have become targets for mass shootings.”

In 2017, the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas became the site of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. MGM Hotels settled a lawsuit for $800 million in the wake of the massacre. That gave pause to the industry, says Professor Lytton.

What the Supreme Court ruling has done is bring the issue out into the open, says Karen Owen, a political scientist at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, who studies civic engagement.

“This is a different kind of scenario where we have not – as voters and as community members in society – thought about how the woman or the man next to us could be ... carrying, because it has been concealed,” she says. “Now, where are we? It’s a different land.”