Atlanta Music Festival Canceled Over Open Carry Law

Billboard Magazine reports:

The long-running Music Midtown festival at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, scheduled for Sept. 17-18 with headliners My Chemical Romance, Future, Jack White and Fallout Boy, has been called off.

The likely cause, industry sources tell Billboard, are recent changes to Georgia gun laws that prevent the festival from banning guns on to the publicly owned festival grounds.

Gun rights groups had been emailing and posting comments of the festival’s social media page for several months, hinting at potential legal challenges.

The Daily Beast reports:

The festival has been held at the city-owned Piedmont Park since 2011. A 2014 Georgia law allowed residents to carry guns on publicly owned land.

That right was expanded by a Georgia Supreme Court ruling in 2019 that held that businesses with short-term leases on public land (e.g., festivals) can’t supersede the statewide right to carry.

This is complicated because artists don’t usually want to perform at venues teeming with guns.

The event didn’t take place in 2020 or 2021 due to COVID.