This is a Kentucky Lantern story republished under Creative Commons. See more from Kentucky Lantern here.
LOUISVILLE — Standing near where a woman was fatally shot last month while walking a child to a school bus stop, a Democratic council member called on the General Assembly to revise gun laws to allow Kentucky’s largest city to make its own rules regulating gun ownership and disposal.
Ken Herndon, who represents the city’s fourth district on the Louisville Metro Council, said Tuesday that statewide laws preempting local gun laws are “ridiculous” and that if they were eased he would propose a waiting period for gun purchases in Louisville.
“All localities in this state have been denied the ability to use legislation to protect our children,” Herndon said. “We owe our children every effort we can muster, with every tool at our disposal, and currently, that tool is not available to us.”
Should the resolution pass and the General Assembly grant Louisville local control, Herndon said a waiting period when purchasing guns is at the “top of my list.”
“At the end of the day, the choice is clear to me that it’s our guns or our kids, and I choose our kids,” Herndon said.
A 2012 Kentucky law bans local governments from regulating the “manufacture, sale, purchase, taxation, transfer, ownership, possession, carrying, storage, or transportation of firearms, ammunition, components of firearms, components of ammunition, firearms accessories or combination thereof.”
Another law from 2015 dictates that local governments can dispose of firearms only by selling them. This law also was criticized in the aftermath of the 2023 mass shooting at Old National Bank in Louisville, when Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city should be allowed to destroy guns used in crimes and confiscated by police rather than having them sold at public auction.
Herndon wants the General Assembly to revise both laws, saying the Republican-controlled legislature has already demonstrated its willingness to make laws specific to Jefferson County. In recent years, the legislature’s Republican supermajority — over the opposition of Democratic lawmakers representing Louisville — has mandated nonpartisan elections for Louisville mayor and council, limited the authority of the local school board and more.
Herndon made his announcement outside the Western Library near the sites of recent shootings. In one instance, a woman who was walking a child to the school bus stop was fatally shot. In another case nearby, a teenager had fired shots near Central High School and Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary.
Dustin Isaacs, a spokesman for the Senate President’s office, said Herndon’s resolution is “symbolic” while “the successes of the Kentucky General Assembly in making communities safer are very real.”
“Lawmakers have a responsibility to protect constitutional rights,” Isaacs said. “The cited statutes protect fundamental rights of law-abiding citizens and create uniformity across all 120 Kentucky counties.”
“Just as Louisville cannot create an exception to limit a citizen’s right to a trial by jury within its borders, it cannot carve out exceptions to the Second Amendment. It’s worth noting that many of the measures cited in the resolution, such as background checks and mental health restrictions, already exist under federal or state law,” he said. “Regarding the disposition of firearms, the General Assembly has already acted in this area through the Safer Kentucky Act, which allows for the destruction of homicide firearms under state law.”
Herndon’s resolution cites polling in support of background checks and mental health screens. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia impose some form of waiting period on firearms purchasers.
On Monday, Metro Council Republicans presented a “Safer Louisville” plan with a slew of policy suggestions that “either address aspects of crime that oftentimes escalate into greater more dangerous criminal activity, seek to improve safe behavior or support efforts to bring more officers to our neighborhoods,” the plan says.
Policies in this proposal include:
- Submit amendments to the Louisville Metro Code of Ordinances to make it an offense (citation) for someone to pass money, food, or other items from their vehicle while on Louisville Metro Arterial Roads.
- Work with the Goodwill’s Another Way Program and other groups to create an education campaign that will include signage to help educate persons that streetside and sidewalk almsgiving or panhandling are not effective and oftentimes counterproductive towards helping persons.
- Invest funding from their Neighborhood Development Funds to create two pilot programs where streetlights are added to areas designated by police as being locations of higher levels of crime.
- Seek additional funding through partnerships with state and other agencies to construct a new, state-of-the-art training facility for regional first responders.
- Sponsor a resolution from members of the Metro Council strongly advocating that the governor and Justice Cabinet do everything it can to expedite the opening of a Juvenile Justice Facility within Jefferson County.
- And more.
“When each member of our caucus campaigned for office, they cited improving public safety as their top priority,” Republican Caucus Chair Anthony Piagentini of District 19 said in a statement. “Although we have already successfully executed some changes, there is a lot more work to do. We believe that Louisville can be one of the safest cities in the country. To accomplish that, we have developed this plan that we wanted to share with the public to further this goal. We cannot have a successful city until we have a safe city.”
Christopher 2X, who advocates against violence in Louisville and runs Game Changers, which mentors youth in Jefferson County, said he can’t challenge anyone’s ideas for making the city safer.
But, he said, change has to happen beyond the guns themselves, because people can find ways to access and misuse guns regardless of laws.
Effectively addressing gun violence, he said, means going upstream and addressing why people want to engage in “reckless gun play” in the first place.
In addition to the gun reforms, Herndon wants to ensure there are crosswalks at all bus stops, start a chess league for youth in his district and more.
“I welcome all serious, good efforts,” 2X told the Lantern. “Will young people still be willing and ready to find weapons, even with new laws? Absolutely they will. And that’s not a knock on anybody. We’ve got to go after these mindsets even harder.”
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2025.