In one city in Georgia, it is illegal not to own a gun.

In Kennesaw, Georgiait’s against the law No possess a weapon.

City law, which dates back to the 1980s, requires residents to possess guns and ammunition.

Kennesaw gun law states: “In order to ensure and protect the general safety and welfare of the city and its inhabitants, every head of household residing within the city limits must have a firearm, together with ammunition.” The law excludes residents with physical or mental disabilities, felony convictions, or conflicting religious beliefs.

“It’s not like you go around carrying it on your hip like you’re in the Wild West,” said Derek Easterling, the city’s three-term mayor. he told the BBC. “We’re not going to knock on your door and say, ‘Let me see your gun.'”

The mayor told the BBC that, to his knowledge and that of many other local officials, no prosecutions or arrests have been made for violating the 1982 law.

The law is a source of pride for some and shame for others. Most residents told the BBC that the law keeps citizens safe as there were no murders in the city in 2023, according to data from the Kennesaw Police Department. However, there were two suicides with firearms.

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“In any case, criminals should worry, because if they break into your house and you are there, they don’t know what you have,” argued customers of a local pizzeria.

“It’s the attitude behind guns here in Kennesaw that keeps gun crime down, not the guns,” Blake Weatherby, a groundskeeper at the First Baptist Church of Kennesaw, told the BBC. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a gun, a fork, a fist or a high-heeled shoe. We protect ourselves and our neighbors.”

At one point, Weatherby said he owned more than 20 guns, but now he owns none.

Pat Ferris, who joined the Kennesaw City Council in 1984, a few years after the gun law was passed, said it was created to be “more of a political statement than anything else” and added that he’s not sure “how much “People even know that the ordinance exists.”

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Morton Grove, Illinois, became the first city in the United States to ban gun ownership, but Kennesaw became the first city to require it. Similar laws have been passed in at least four other American cities: Gun Barrel City, Texas; Virgin, Utah; Nelson, Georgia and Nucla, Colorado.

Councilwoman Madelyn Orochena described the law as “a strange little tidbit about our community.”

“Residents will roll their eyes in embarrassment or laugh at it,” he told the BBC.

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