Celebrate the 4th with Leo and LT COL Rardin! Bang Bang Bang!

Good morning, and I hope you can still count to 10 on your fingers!

Kevin Rardin worked as an attorney at 201 Poplar, the courthouse for Memphis, TN, for ~4 decades.  He was also a juvenile magistrate, spending a year judging cases.

On the 4th, it seems appropriate to discuss guns.  Kevin will go into a Tennessee law that was amended, with the changes going into effect on July 1, 2026.  This law affects the conditions required for a citizen to utilize deadly force to protect his or her property.

If you are going to pull the trigger to protect your property, it would be wise to fully understand the law (if you don't like going to prison and losing your house / car / dog in a lawsuit).  Perhaps listen to a man that spent a career in TN law.

After that, Kevin will go into more TN legal changes - namely the changes no longer requiring gun-toters to have a permit.  Kevin will provide his opinion on this change, and how to potentially empower Memphis Police and Shelby County Sheriff's Deputies at the legislative level to keep Memphis safe from those that seek to commit felonious assaults with guns.

HUGE thank you to Kevin Rardin for taking the time to provide vital information in a world of confusion and fake news.

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Good morning and happy Fourth of July. Hello, Kevin.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello, Leo. Good morning to you and happy Fourth of July to you. It's great to be with you again.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Thank you. You've been on the show before. You've been introduced, but for first-time listeners, would you mind giving them a Twitter version of what makes you qualified to discuss this subject?

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Sure, I'd be glad to. Well, I'm a lawyer by profession. I've been a lawyer coming up on 42 years. I was an assistant district attorney here in Shelby County, Memphis, Tennessee, down at the infamous 201 Poplar for 33 of those years. I was an assistant public defender in juvenile court for five years. I was a juvenile court magistrate for about a year. And then concurrently, I was a judge advocate, military lawyer in the reserve components of the U.S. Army, both the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard. Did a tour of, I was deployed October 2007-2008 on active duty with the U.S. Army in Southern Afghanistan, where I was a legal advisor to a training mission to the Afghan Army and the Afghan police. Retired from the Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel, retired from the practice of law altogether in August of 2024. Okay. Thank you for your service to the county. Thank you, Leo. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

That's a that's a long career at 201 Topplar.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

More than one lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

So you were a magistrate in juvenile court. I was. As a judge.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Right. You might say deputy judge. I heard cases under the supervision of the elected juvenile court judge.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Okay. Was part of your job determining if laws were applied correctly?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Aaron Ross Powell Oh, yes, of course. I think that's a part of any judge's or magistrate's job. Which is what we'll be talking about today. Yes. Yes, we will. And since I'm retired, I can talk about it without any restrictions.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Aaron Powell I've been seeing some things. I saw this bill come through, and it appeared, as we discussed offline, to be a pretty radical change to how it's been here in Tennessee, what the law has been regarding using deadly force as a private citizen. Yes. And I just wanted to go through a little bit of what was introduced as the proposed changes, a little bit of what the process is, because we've all seen when a bill becomes a law, or how, you know, the little song on the non-flat screen TVs where the little bill is singing on the steps. But we don't remember any of that. So something was proposed, something different was passed. And as of July 1st, three days ago, that law is now in effect. And so I wanted to go into with you as someone who made a bit of a living, you know, looking at things like this and interpreting it and make sure that the people know before they pull the trigger what the rules are.

unknown 3:38

Right.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

In your humble opinion. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Sure. I'd be glad to talk with you about all that. Right. Back early in the legislative session that closed just recently, Tennessee state legislative session. We're not talking about the federal government. Yeah, we're only talking Tennessee here. Right, right. Tennessee state law. Bill was introduced in both the House and the Senate. The bill was identical. But it had to be introduced in both the House and the Senate. It was called in the Senate was called SB 1847. And on the House side it was called HB 1802. But again, as I said, the the the bills were identical. And when you brought this to my attention earlier this week, I was shocked and frankly horrified because uh it seemed like such a radical change in the laws governing the use of deadly force. The legislation established that a person is justified in using deadly force against another and when to the degree the person reasonably believes deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent or terminate the other's actual or attempted attack criminal trespass, arson, danger to property, including danger to damage to livestock, burglary, theft, robbery, aggravated cruelty to animals, and the person believes that the property cannot be protected or the other's actions terminated by any other means, or use a force other than deadly force to protect or determinate the other's actions would expose the person or a third person to a risk of serious bodily injury. Now, when I was in law school, and when you were trained as a law enforcement officer, we learned that deadly force can be used when a person is in fear of imminent death or serious bodily injury, or when another person is at risk of death or serious bodily injury. We learn that citizens, human beings, can use deadly force to protect human life. This legislation goes beyond using deadly force to protect human life. It says, as introduced, and we'll talk about that later, that you can use deadly force to protect property, such as your land, your house, even your business, I suppose, damage to property, including damage to livestock, burglary, again, your residence, your business, theft, theft of your car, robbery of your property, aggravated cruelty to animals, again, living creatures, but property under our understanding of the law. So this in my mind was a radical extension of authorization to use deadly force, going well beyond use of deadly force to protect human life, but to protect property. I said I thought it was horrible, and I still do. Do we want to say that property is of equal weight to a human life? I don't know that we want to do that. I don't know that we should do that as a society. Well, I did some research and I learned that fortunately, this proposed legislation is not what ultimately emerged from the legislative process. The bill that ultimately became law. So it was passed. It was passed in a different form. But in a very, very different form. During the legislative process, the original bill or bills were amended and changed to something that is very different. And that's why we need to talk about it today. If people I suspect that many people have read or heard on social media about the original legislation and this extension of the right to use deadly force to protect not only human life, but to protect property. If they rely on what they have heard or read about the original bill or bills, and they take someone's life, they're going to be in a heap of trouble, as people used to say. They could end up in court, faced with a charge of murder first degree, murder second degree, and end up in prison for life or for many years. So that's why we need to talk about the actual legislation that emerged. It has an effective date of July 1st, 2026. Now, since we're here on the 4th of July, the law is already in effect. And this is the law we're all governed by now when it comes to the use of deadly force. It lowers the standard for the use of deadly force to protect property to an extent, but not to the extent that people heard about earlier this year. It says that a person who is not engaged in conduct that would constitute a felony or class A misdemeanor. In other words, you cannot be, for example, selling drugs when this the use of deadly force becomes a question. And who is in a place where the person lawfully resides, you've got to be in your apartment or your house or on the property surrounding the house or the apartment. With deadly force, you may use deadly force to prevent the imminent commission of certain specified offenses. Arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or aggravated cruelty to animals.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

So trespass is gone. Right. And it left the basically violent felonies.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yes, yes. Now, legally, of course, burglary is treated as a property crime in Tennessee, but it is a what I c would call a quasi-violent crime because of the potential for violence when someone breaks into your house and there's an unfortunate encounter inside the house or outside the house. Arson could be considered a quasi-violent crime. Because if you set fire to the house and there's somebody in it, somebody's going to die. The others are clearly violent crimes: robbery, aggravated robbery, aggravated cruelty to animals. So now, yes, there is some authorization to use deadly force to protect property, but it's not nearly what it could have been. Or what I think what would have been very unfortunate, in my opinion. Now to find the current law, you would look at Tennessee Code annotated 39-11-614. It amended subsection C and put in a new subsection C. It says a person who's not engaged in conduct that would constitute a felony or a Class A misdemeanor, can't be breaking the law yourself, and you're in a place where you lawfully reside, got to be at home, is justified in using deadly force against another to protect property. You still can use deadly force to protect yourself from death, imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm. You still can use deadly force to protect another person from death, the imminent fear of death, or great bodily harm. However, now you can also use deadly force when and to the degree the person reasonably believes deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or aggravated cruelty to animals. And you must reasonably believe the property cannot be protected, or the other's actions terminated by other means. And this is important, there is an imminent danger to the person, meaning you, or a third person of death, serious bodily injury or grave sexual abuse. That's also a violent crime, or the use of force other than deadly force to protect or determinate the other's actions would expose the person or a third person to a risk of death, serious bodily injury or grave sexual abuse. So yes, you've got you may use deadly force to prevent some another person's imminent commission of these specified violent crimes, but the way I read this, there's still got to be an imminent danger to you or a third person of death, serious bodily injury, or grave sexual abuse, or the risk of those outcomes. So the law has not changed as much as it would have under the original legislation, not nearly as much.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

And I I agree with what you're saying that that's a good thing, even beyond the general what's more valuable, life or property. I think a lot of people romanticize vigilante street justice. Yes. But as somebody that prosecuted and defended for years and judged, how many times did you see cases of a vigilante that made a mistake? Oh, yes. And they end up in court. Yeah, you certainly read about those things. These people that are executing vigilante justice and taking lives without any kind of due process, essentially, and just, you know, somebody's stealing a car and they shoot at them, or, you know, things like this. Mistakes are made where they think somebody's stealing a car when really they're trying to get into their own car. And green lighting gunfire to protect property, it just there's a reason that cops don't just come out blazing because sometimes you talk to the person and it's they weren't actually doing anything wrong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Not so long ago, my wife actually tried to get somebody else's car. There you go. Yeah, and she could have been shot.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Did it look similar at least? Oh, very. Okay. There you go.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah. Yeah, it looked similar.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Yeah, and they could have they could have popped the shot at it.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Exactly. Exactly. Like their car. Suppose all right, let's suppose this original bill came into effect, and you used your deadly force to prevent someone from stealing your car. Okay. All right. And there was no there was no imminent risk of death or or serious bodily injury to you or somebody else, but there was the risk your car was going to be stolen. So you shot that person. And it turns out the person's a teenager. You have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge that you shot a teenager to death over your 2013 or 2015 Ford Bronco. Expensive, valuable piece of property, but is it really worth a child's life? No, of course not. No. So I'm glad that didn't happen in Tennessee. I kind of wonder about the the wisdom of the legislators who sponsored this type of radical legislation. Fortunately, their their original bills or bills did not become law. I think ultimately the legislation did emerge perhaps will cause judges or juries in the right situations to give perhaps a little more deference to someone who uses deadly force in one of these situations. But that's about it.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Wonderful person. She was in bed, bath, and beyond a few years ago, and some people were stealing some comforters. And they ran, she was in the aisle, and they ran into her and knocked her down, ran off. And she was in an outrage. Adrenaline was a worst insult she could have taken is getting knocked down by the they didn't steal her stuff. They just fled the store with some comforters. So she called me not too long afterwards. She said, Did you hear about what happened? I said, Oh yeah. She said, Well, I'm getting a gun. So what kind should I get? I said, Well, Grammy, let's let's talk before we jump to this. A series of questions. Are you gonna practice with the gun consistently so that you learn how to work it? She's never had a gun. Sure. She's 77 or so. So are you gonna practice with this like a lot? Hold your answers. Next question. Are you going to take a life if you need to? If they pull a gun on you, do you think you're gonna go in your purse and bring it out and pull the trigger at that person? I don't think that's your personality. At which point she interrupted me. I love her. I'm not insulting her, but she said, Well, I had another recent incident where there was this homeless guy and he kept banging on my window at the red light and he would not leave me alone. And I said, Yeah, that's not a great gun situation either. No. I said, if you shot that homeless guy, you're you're that's murder. And she was like, Well, maybe I just like show it to him. I said, please don't get a gun. I said, get some pepper spray. I said, if you pepper spray the wrong person by accident, if it's iffy, if they're homeless and leaning in your car window and you pepper spray them, you're not going to jail.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

No.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

You could say I was trying to protect myself and then I drove away. If you shoot that guy in the face, you're done.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Please, and how oh, my last question was, how are you going to keep it safe? I said, mostly you're all you always have grandkids around. The least likely outcome is you saving a life with this gun. The most likely is a kid getting into it, it getting stolen, or you losing it, or it being the source of stress of I always have this gun with me that I don't really know how to use. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Yeah. I uh I you're a law enforcement officer, plus I know you're uh you are military and you've served in wartime. I I am not a law enforcement officer, but I retired military and did serve in wartime as well. It is an enormous res e even in a situation, it's an enormous responsibility to bear a fire. I found that to be true. During my service in Afghanistan, I was always very worried that I was going to lose my weapon. I kept that either on me or within my reach at all times because I knew my military days would be over if I lost my firearm. So you you have to it it is an enormous amount of responsibility. And then plus I think you have to think long and hard about whether you would be willing to kill to protect yourself or to protect someone else close to you, family member, a colleague, a friend. I thought about that long and hard before I I went to Afghanistan. I ultimately I decided that I would kill to try to protect myself or somebody else with me. Even if you're a civilian here on this side of the water, I think you still have to give that subject long, hard thought. You have to get training in the use of a firearm. And plus, this is an example of where you've got to rely on good information. You cannot rely unless you you want to run the risk of ending up in prison. Or even if you don't end up in prison, you have to bear the weight of killing somebody when it could have been avoided. You need to get the law and understand the law. And understand what may be the law in your cousin Joe's state may not be the law where you live. We have 50 states in the Union and 50 sets of codes, criminal codes. The law in the Northeast may not be what the law is in the South. And vice versa. Vice versa. Different attitudes shape different laws.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Definitely worth looking at where you're at, but I think the general safe assumption is if somebody's about to take your life or take someone else's, you can do what needs to be done to stop theirs. If they're doing it feloniously. Yes. But yeah, that the way the proposition was worded was it I read it and was like, oh, if people are believing this, we're gonna have a lot more murders in Memphis. Oh, I did because people steal and break into cars every day. And if you've if you rally up the posse and say you can you can shoot those people, yeah, it goes and it's usually small groups of guys, so I could just see people trying to articulate. Well, I you know, if I'd approached them and said stop, I probably would have got shot at. So I fire. Yeah, I'm I'm glad it didn't go through as written.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

Me too. I uh that would have been a really unfortunate outcome.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Let me pick your brain on another subject. Okay. I don't think you'll mind answering, even though I'm ambushing you. That's all right. You may fire when ready. Okay. All right, we're gonna wrap it up there. That was a dad joke. Um well done. So the change, I don't know, it's been maybe four or five years now to the law in Tennessee no longer requiring pistol toters to have a permit. Are you familiar with this? I am, yeah. I heard complaints from some Memphis police officers that, you know, Beale Street, the main drag, where everybody goes to listen to music and get drinks and all that. There's a lot of shootings down there. And they would tell me that they it's common to stop a car or two loaded down with gang members, all with guns. And now that permits are not required, they would just have to cut those guys loose. Whereas they used to take the guns and write them a ticket. And the real point being get four gang members away from Beale Street that are loaded down with military-level artillery, they could they can't do anymore. And my thought was in in general Tennessee, it's probably great because you know, you go to Crockett County, you don't have that. But in Memphis, it was it's it's problematic. So I guess my question is twofold. What are your thoughts on that? And is there a way that Memphis or Shelby County could pass an ordinance or something because the crime problem here is different than the other 90 counties across this great state?

SPEAKER_01 27:11

I only have initially I I I based on what I saw as a public defender, and I was a public defender from I think from 2016 to sometime in 2021 or 2022, I would agree with those Memphis Police Department officers who talked with you about the firearms. Some of my clients, frankly, told me where they got their pistols. And these were high-quality, expensive pistols. They weren't what we would have called a Saturday night specialist years ago. High point Yemen. Yes. They got them out of part cars. Bopping. And trucks. Yeah, bopping. Bopping. That was exactly the term. I I learned that term from as a public defender. They would go out, groups of young men, and prowl cars and trucks, checking to see if the cars were locked. Many times they were not locked, start rummaging around inside and pull out a pistol, a nice pistol. That's how they got their arms. So when the law's changed, the laws the law nowhere no longer requires a permit. Uh more people decided to carry firearms in their vehicles. And they weren't uh being safe about how they stored those weapons. So they ended up they, in effect, arm the people they worry about, young men with guns. So as a result, we've had a proliferation of firearms on the streets of Memphis and Shelby County. And the police have, as you as they told you, have lost a tool they could use to apprehend these young people and get them off the street and get the weapons off the street.

unknown 29:18

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

The goal not being disarm Johnny that's driving to Kroger is stop the violence in the Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Yeah, stop the stop the person who's going to use the firearm to commit other crimes other than the possession of the firearm. So that change in the law has made the situation here in Memphis worse. Now, in other parts of the state, in the more rural areas of the state, the change in the law perhaps didn't lead to the consequences we've seen here in Shelby County. Shelby County is very urban, heavily populated. Other parts of the state very rural, lightly populated. It's possible that law enforcement in those jurisdictions may know most of the people they encounter on the street, and they know who's carrying and who's not. But generally that's not possible under our system of laws here in the United States. Ultimately, the federal government has priority. If a state law conflicts with a federal law, state law has to fall. The federal law reigns supreme. If a county ordinance or a city ordinance conflicts with a state law, the county ordinance or the city ordinance has to fall. The state's position would be that we've already legislated on this issue. We've abolished the requirement to have a permit. Therefore, you cannot legislate on this issue in a way that conflicts with what we've already said. And chances are I think the state would prevail in court.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Okay. So is there a difference between there being because I hear what you're saying, that they've already legislated it. Is there a difference between there being a lack of a law, so they've abolished it, so it's not there, or is there a law in the books, to your knowledge, saying no permit is required specifically?

SPEAKER_01 32:13

If the state were completely silent on that issue, then a city or a county might have a chance of passing a some sort of restriction. Trevor Burrus, Jr. But since it's been discussed and legislative. Discussed, there there is there once was a requirement for a permit. Now the state has abolished the requirement for a permit. Probably the city or the county's argument's not going to carry a lot of weight.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Trevor Burrus, Jr. So as as we've discussed, and you know this is true for anybody that's listening and not in Memphis, these are facts. And for the Memphis listeners, they're going to go, yeah, it's true. It is normal for there to be five to ten guys outside a gas station, in a gas station, at the entrance to an apartment complex, in a car out right outside Beale Street. If you name a place that people might congregate in parks, sometimes up to, I've seen up to 40 guys, mostly with guns on them open, including rifles in hand. But normal 40 is a lot. I've only seen gatherings that size a handful of times. But five to seven to 10 is pretty common in certain parts of the city. Is there a way? And as it is right now, if a Memphis police car pulls up and there's seven guys at the uh Quickie Mart, the shell station at uh, we'll say American Way and Getwell, and there's seven guys out front with guns in their pants, and they're all flying purple bandanas of Great Street Crip, and open gang membership with guns standing there, scaring the daylights out of people, impending violence. Yeah, it's safe to assume with that group and that mindset. Is there anything that can be done at this point at the legislative level so that the police can keep Memphis safe? There might be.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

And I'm no expert on all this, but the situation you've described is very different from an individual who has a firearm. Here you're describing a group of persons perhaps acting in concert. They're wearing some sort of identifying mark or bandana, which implies there's some sort of organization behind them.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

And they're all armed.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

It's almost as if they're like a private group, a vigilante group, or a militia of some sort.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

There's a gang called in the Spring Valley neighborhood in Memphis. It goes by Spring Valley Militia. Oh.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

Well, there might be a way to restrict that kind of activity. I don't know exactly what the law would look like, but there might be a way to get out that I mean I don't know how we would do that, but I I think So you're thinking the the organization would be the way to deal with that.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah. I I we've seen, you know, I don't I'm avoiding politics like the plague on this show. Of course. But we've seen the current administration declare certain narco trafficking groups terrorist organizations.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

I don't know how to deal with gangs because when any big city police officer is out there, they deal with active gang members damn near daily. And these gangs, they're not doing community service. They are a danger on our streets.

unknown 36:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Crips, bloods, vice lords, GDs, et cetera, et cetera. In Memphis, you got AOB, Young Mob, Memphis Mob. We can go on for days, fast cash boys. But I wish there could be some kind of criminalizing gang membership. Obviously, it would take a lot of caution to not overreach into reasonable groups.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

We all have freedom of association under the federal and state constitutions, even when it comes to membership in disreputable organizations. Organizations that we would not want to encourage. However, all rights are subject to some restriction. There even the freedom of association. You mentioned the uh terrorism, the uh administration's uh labeling uh alleged narco trafficantes as terrorists. And we're seeing the government strike at using the Navy to strike at alleged drug smugglers on the high seas now there uh whatever the le legality of that, and I'm inclined to think it is illegal, I don't think we would want to see our law enforcement agencies apply the same methods here at home.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

My implication is not putting snipers on the roads in South Memphis at all. Right. It's just it it's what is the outside the box solution because there are groups of guys that openly are criminals. And not only do they victimize people, but the young kids in their neighborhood, age five to fifteen, see them and get corrupted by them. Of course they do. They're cool. Yeah, they have guns and girls and cars. They have money, they have cash, they have cars, they have girls, they have guns. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: All that crap. They have tattoos. And so how do we-I mean, the point of incarceration, right? How do we not only get them out of rotation, how do we keep them from victimizing the populace? And I include that in the young, impressionable minds. It's a long struggle.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Uh I wish I think that we have seen some beneficial impact from the additional law enforcement presence. Here in Memphis for many months. And some of those people are gonna go into federal court, and when they get convicted, they're gonna go away and stay away. They've been incapacitated. They will be incapacitated for many, many years to come. The issue is what comes after this. How do we keep from raising another generation who will fill up the prisons 20 years from now? It's a long-sustained struggle, and and the solutions aren't always store strictly law enforcement solutions.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

Trevor Burrus, Jr. As we've discussed, the if there's no laws prohibiting standing at a gang meeting with 50 guys with guns out, what does that NPD officer do? They ride by. Of course they do. You can't enforce even if you had the manpower, even if you had 10 SWAT teams and you could take them down, they didn't commit a crime. Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

And if the officer were to uh disregard the laws and the rights of those people, he would perhaps lose his job, be subject to a federal civil rights lawsuit, and even possibly be uh charged with a crime.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Well, thank you so much for helping interpret laws and keep the listeners out of prison, my Tennessee listeners, or those that come visit me, so that they don't shoot somebody at Kroger Steel in their car.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Well, you're very welcome, Leo. You know, it's uh we don't want people to be in prison. Uh so uh if people want to exercise their right to bear arms, they need to do so with deliberation, training, and knowledge of the law.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

If there's a lawmaker listening, maybe we talk to some Memphis leadership and figure out how to help these cops to get these boneheads with guns off the street. Yes. Not just political grandstanding, but real thought. Yeah. Thanks a lot. You're very welcome. Happy fourth, everybody. Don't blow your fingers off.