NASHVILLE, Tennessee - October 3, 2010 - Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops, when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.

Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who has recently seen his rights greatly expanded by a new law - one of the nation’s first - that allows citizens to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on (his or her) charity to keep me alive,” said Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.

Gun rights advocates like Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but some customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.

“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”

Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right - not just in connection with a well-regulated militia - to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.