In the wake of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, it seemed like there was a strong chance of the state getting some form of gun control. Gov. Bill Lee called the legislature into a special session with the goal of passing just that.
What we saw was an absolute circus, to say the least, and the session ended with jack squat being accomplished.
In fact, since then, while anti-gun advocates have tried as hard as they can, they’re not just having a bad time in Tennessee. They’re having a bad enough of a time that the progressive media is reporting on it.
“I thought March 27th (2023) would be the tipping point for gun violence and safety,” said Justin Pearson, a local Democratic assemblyman.
That day, a shooter killed three children and three adults at The Covenant School, a Nashville elementary school.
“But I also thought we would do something as a country after Sandy Hook,” Pearson added, referring to the massacre that claimed 26 lives, including 20 young children.
The Tennessee shooting was at “a private Christian conservative school, so I did have a modicum of hope that this would be the threshold for them to really do something different — and they failed,” he said.
– ‘Make it worse’ –
Shortly after the tragedy, Pearson and another Black elected official were expelled from the local legislature for protesting inside the institution — an extremely rare punishment.
A third white Democrat, who also advocated for stricter gun laws, was spared.
Both expelled lawmakers were swiftly reelected, but the tragedy failed to produce any legislation restricting firearm access.
Instead, a new law passed this year allowed teachers to carry weapons.
“We did everything possible to prevent it,” said Alexander, who, alongside Mary Joyce, leads the ‘Covenant Moms,’ a group of school mothers who mobilized after the shooting.
So what gives?
Well, in short, activists can’t suddenly change a state’s politics. They can try and advocate for certain laws, but at the end of the day, what politicians are going to care about are votes, and the voters aren’t really tripping over themselves to support gun control.
Two examples that we covered earlier today illustrate this perfectly. For one thing, in a head-to-head matchup, Donald Trump has a six-point lead over Kamala Harris on the gun issue. More people trust him over Harris, who has actually toned down her past rhetoric on guns and touts herself as a gun owner but still vocally supports some gun control laws.
But that’s national. Tennessee doesn’t necessarily reflect the national trends, and they don’t here, either. That’s clear by looking at the race for one of the state’s seats in the United States Senate. That “third white Democrat” noted above? She’s getting her butt kicked in the polls. In fact, if the election returns look at all like the polling number, I’d move out of the entire state if I lost that badly.
The truth is that many in the state aren’t buying that the shooting in Nashville was a gun issue. In fact, let’s be real here. You had a trans shooter targeting a Christian school. It’s not hard for folks in a conservative state like Tennessee to look at that and figure the issue lies somewhere else. Whether it does or not is irrelevant. You screaming about guns while ignoring the shooter isn’t going to convince people who are already looking at the shooter.Just sayin’.
So I’m not surprised that anti-gunners are lamenting the fact that they’re not making change in Tennessee. Meanwhile, it seems that despite living their, these folks don’t actually understand the state at all.
