MARTA Police Chief Darin Schierbaum’s push to strip law-abiding Georgians of their right to carry on public transit is the latest example of how “public safety” rhetoric is being weaponized to create gun-free zones that only criminals will honor. Georgia’s constitutional-carry law already recognizes that a permitless carrier on a bus or train is statistically indistinguishable from one walking down the sidewalk, yet Schierbaum wants to carve out an arbitrary 90-square-mile exception where citizens become sitting ducks. The data from states that allow carry on transit—Texas, Ohio, and others—show no uptick in transit-related shootings, undermining the chief’s claim that steel tubes and electric rails somehow transform otherwise peaceful carriers into threats.

The timing is equally telling: MARTA ridership is still recovering from pandemic lows while car-jackings and smash-and-grabs in metro Atlanta remain stubbornly high. Rather than flooding the system with more police or fixing broken windows, leadership is choosing to criminalize the very citizens who already exercise the most effective deterrent—lawful self-defense. For the 2A community this is a reminder that “may-issue” thinking never truly dies; it simply rebrands itself as “sensitive-place” incrementalism, betting that commuters worried about missing the next train won’t notice their rights being peeled away one platform at a time.

If the proposal advances, expect lawsuits testing whether a state that constitutionalized permitless carry can simultaneously declare its public infrastructure a permanent “sensitive place.” More importantly, riders who value both safety and liberty should recognize that the same logic used against guns on MARTA can be redeployed against guns in parks, at stadiums, or on sidewalks—anywhere officials decide the Second Amendment is inconvenient.