Governor Bill Lee has signed Tennessee Bill SB1847 into law on May 22, 2026. The bill reforms the law on restrictions of the use of deadly force, allowing some uses of deadly force to protect property in certain circumstances.
Tennessee Bill SB1847 started out as a significant expansion of the legal use of deadly force in Tennessee. The bill would have made the use of deadly force in defense of property legal for a broad swath of issues, including trespass. In the Legislative process the bill was amended to specify the use of deadly force would be legally acceptable in fewer situations.
From a previous AmmoLand article:
The new language allows residents to use deadly force to prevent “the other’s imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or aggravated cruelty to animals; “if the resident reasonably believes the property cannot otherwise be protected and the use of lesser force would expose the resident or a third party to “a risk of death, serious bodily injury, or grave sexual abuse.”
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The bill passed both houses on April 23, 2026. The bill took a month to be signed by Governor Bill Lee. Legislatures have a sequence of events which are required before a governor signs a bill into law, vetoes the bill, or in Tennessee as in some other states, allows the bill to become law without the governor’s signature. Those sequences allow the leadership of a legislature to speed up or delay the sending of the bill to the governor. The governor can choose when to sign a bill after it is received, within limits.
Tennessee’s process is fairly straightforward. The bill is made ready for the signatures of the Senate Speaker and the House Speaker, to certify the bill is what the legislature passed. This can happen very quickly, if the leadership insists on it. For SB1847 it took a week until April 30. The Senate Speaker signed on the same day, April 30. The House speaker did not sign for a week, on May 7th. Sending the bill to the Governor for signature is said to be automatic. May 7th was a Thursday. SB1847 was sent to Governor Bill Lee on the 11th, the next Monday. The Governor has ten days, not counting Sundays, in Tennessee to sign, veto, or allow the bill to become law without the governor’s signature. Governor Lee waited the full 10 days, not counting the intervening Sunday, and signed the bill on the May 22.
The bill is now signed and will become effective as of July 1, 2026.
This correspondent expected SB1847 to be signed a week or two sooner than it was. The votes for passage were supermajorities. In the House, 62-24; in the Senate, 23-5. In Tennessee, only simple majorities in both houses are necessary to override a veto. The amended bill is not a radical change. It gives people who are protecting themselves, others, and their property a little more legal protection than they had before.
SB1847 moves Tennessee law a little closer to Texas law about the use of deadly force in protecting property.
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About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
Thieves wreck lives too. Not just violence. In fact, chronic runaway theft can make life hardly worth living.
Great day for law-abiding Tennessean’s! Congratulations!
Property crimes can be ” Gateway Crimes ”
When a lawbreaker gets away with committing property crimes it emboldens them to experiment with other types of crime.
There are cases of criminals graduating from Breaking and Entering to
becoming Serial Killers.
Treating property crimes much more harshly will cause an overall reduction in crime.
This law doesn’t really change responding with deadly force against acts creating the reasonable belief of an imminent threat of serious physical injury or death to self or others. Armed robbery, rape, burglary of an occupied dwelling, arson, etc., is all about protecting from being physically injured. A big change is shooting to protect animals. It’s not open season on criminals. Citizens still have to justify a reasonable fear of extreme violence.
Well, that accomplished nearly nothing, if anything at all. You have a right to defend your property. This bill only acknowledges that you can’t be prevented from protecting it if in doing so you’d be exposed to a threat to your life or limb, which is a circumstance in which you’ve always been able to use lethal force to protect yourself (while doing what you’ve always had a right to do – protect your property with less-than-lethal force). This law would only have acknowledged the right to use lethal force to defend property if it allowed lethal force ab initio,… Read more »
Tennessee became a state on June 1, 1796. Tennessee was the 16th state admitted to the United States. The region was initially part of North Carolina and later the Southwest Territory before achieving statehood. The admission marked a significant step in the westward expansion of the United States. Tennessee earned the nickname “The Volunteer State” due to its citizens’ readiness to serve in military conflicts, notably during the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War.
IMO, in the event you need to confront an intruder or someone stealing from your shed, have a video camera to record the incident. Might help in cutting down the BS red tape should you be required to defend self as well.
The sponsors of this bill just had to add “… cruelty to animals”. So under this law someone throwing a shoe at a dog shitting on their lawn could be gunned down ? Why does everything associated with emotionality, ie “Awwww, poor doggie”, have to go too fkn far, and give more protection to dogs than the unborn have.