Atlanta’s Music Midtown 2022 is canceled. Organizers reportedly nixed the festival held at ATL’s Piedmont Park September 17 and 18 due to a change in Georgia gun laws that allow festivalgoers to bring firearms to the event, as per Billboard.
Organizers of the festival took to social media to make the announcement. Read it below:
Hey Midtown fans – due to circumstances beyond our control, Music Midtown will no longer be taking place this year. We were looking forward to reuniting in September and hope we can all get back to enjoying the festival together again soon. pic.twitter.com/cI5M37UNW8
— Music Midtown (@MusicMidtown) August 1, 2022
While festival organizers did not cite the gun law, Billboard reported that 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.”
The publication went on to give some history on the gun law:
That law – officially known as the “Safe Carry Protection Act” expanded Georgia’s already permissive gun statues to grant residents the right to pack heat in bars, churches, schools and other private businesses with the owners permission. It also expanded gun carry rights on publicly owned land, like the city-owned Piedmont Park, although there was no legal consensus on whether or not the law applied to private events on city property, like Midtown Music.
That changed in 2019 when the Georgia Supreme Court set new rules on what types of businesses could and couldn’t bar guns on publicly owned land. Five years earlier, a Georgia gun rights group filed a lawsuit against the Atlanta Botanical Garden after one of its members was briefly detained for attempting to openly carry a holstered pistol into the garden, which is located on publicly owned land.
As part of the 2019 ruling, Georgia’s high court set a test for how the Safe Carry Protection Act was to be enforced by private businesses using public land. Businesses and groups that held certain types of long-term leases for state-owned land could legally bar guns, while businesses with shorter term leases could not. While the ruling favored the Botanical Garden, it created legal issues for festivals like Music Midtown that held short term leases for city parks sites.
Billboard also noted that the year off will give Music Midtown organizers time to find another location for the event. Whether or not headliners My Chemical Romance, Future, Jack White and along with other 2022 performers will return is yet to be announced.
