By Emily Hirst, GMA Assistant General Counsel
The Georgia Supreme Court recently returned a case that, at first blush, appears to turn on second amendment rights, to the trial court. However, at its core, GeorgiaCarry.org, Inc. et al. v. Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Inc., hinges upon another key question to Georgia cities.
What is, and what is not, public property when it comes to the ability to prohibit firearms?
Five years before the case, in 2014, Phillip Evans, a member of the gun rights organization GeorgiaCarry.org, twice visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. On both occasions he openly carried a handgun in a holster on his waistband.
The gardens are operated by a private non-profit corporation, which has an established no firearms policy within the garden grounds. Although Evans was not prevented from entering during his first visit, on the second occasion he was told that firearms were not permitted in the garden, except for those held by police officers.
GeorgiaCarry.org promptly filed suit seeking to overturn the Garden’s firearms policy. The Atlanta Botanical Garden responded to the complaint by citing a Georgia statute that permits owners of private property to prohibit firearms from being brought onto their property. The trial court accepted the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s arguments and dismissed GeorgiaCarry.org’s complaint. GeorgiaCarry.org then appealed, arguing that the Atlanta Botanical Garden is not private property because the land itself is owned by the city of Atlanta and is leased to the Atlanta Botanical Garden by the city. The Georgia Supreme Court saw merit in this argument and returned the case to the trial court in 2016.
The trial court once again held in favor of Atlanta Botanical Garden after the Supreme Court sent it back the first time, a decision which was upheld by the Georgia Court of Appeals. Thus, the case came before the Georgia Supreme Court for the second time. This time the Court held that the trial court should have spent time on the merits of GeorgiaCarry.org’s arguments.
The Georgia Supreme Court recently returned a case that, at first blush, appears to turn on second amendment rights, to the trial court. However, at its core, GeorgiaCarry.org, Inc. et al. v. Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Inc., hinges upon another key question to Georgia cities.
Specifically, the Court found that “[b]ecause the lease between the Garden and the city is not in the record and because this question turns on its interpretation, summary judgement in favor of the garden should not have been granted.”
In short, the court needed to see if the Atlanta Botanical Garden actually owned the land for the purposes of the private property exemption. As the land was leased, this is likely the end of the road for this case.
The implications of this decision may be wide reaching. In practice, this could mean that private facilities being operated by private entities on public land (think sports stadiums, art galleries, fairs or amphitheaters) could not prevent people from entering with a firearm. One exception to this rule is that firearms may be prohibited from buildings that contain government offices, per Georgia law.
The practical implication from the likely result of this case is that local governments may look at ways to put government offices in buildings that do not currently have such offices. Of course, this does not create a solution to situations in which the public land is being leased by a private party. Without an exemption for such leases, private entities may be reluctant to lease real property from government entities in the future because of the lack of ability to provide desired security measures for their own, private events.
This article appears in the January/February 2020 edition of
Georgia’s Cities Magazine.