by David Lewis » Mon Oct 06, 2008 6:09 pm
There is no gun registration per se in Nashville, or in Tennessee, for that matter. Prior to enactment of the statewide handgun carry permit law, there were at least 95 different sets of rules & regulations governing carrying handguns (one per county...individual municipalities could, and did, have their own, in many cases). The sections of the Municipal code I could find were related to the old county-issued "special police commission", which has been effectively superceded by the State's shall-issue permit law.
Now, just because there is no de jure registration does not mean that records haven't been kept. Once, prior to the enactment of TICS (Tennessee Instant Check System), local approval paperwork for a handgun purchase was required. Much depended on who was the Chief of Police in Nashville as to the relative ease or difficulty of purchasing a handgun from a dealer in town. It could be done in a matter of hours, if you "walked it through". I usually did so, and was standing in the Metro Nashville PD office where purchases were approved when the lady working there showed me a printout of every handgun I'd purchased from a dealer in Davidson County, several of which I'd sold or traded over the years. I was still the owner of record according to Metro PD. I was not a happy camper.
Nowadays, such record-keeping is prohibited by statute. Do those old records still exist? I'd bet on it.
John, feel free to jump in here & correct me.
David