Red-state legislatures are the incubator and the proving ground of many varieties of right-wing nutjobbery that go on to affect national policy, but most people give no thought to what happens in their chambers. Even here in the South — where, to all appearances, our legislatures gather mainly to subvert democracy and rend the social safety net — few people seemed to be paying attention last week when the Tennessee General Assembly convened in Nashville for the new legislative session.
But a bipartisan coalition of gun-safety advocates, some of them people who a year ago could not have imagined spending their days at the Capitol, were doing far more than paying attention. Here in Tennessee, firearms are the leading cause of death in children, and these voters are determined to do something about that.
Poll after poll and referendum after referendum make it clear that Republican legislators are out of step with their own voters on a host of topics. And for parents, especially, none is more urgent than the issue of guns. Whether they are Democrats or Republicans makes no difference: Parents are desperate to find a way to keep children from being murdered in their classrooms.
Around here, though, voters’ priorities don’t concern G.O.P. leaders. Instead, they want to ban Pride flags — or any political or identity-based flag — in public schools. They want to limit who can speak and for how long on the House floor. They want to control which Tennesseans can sit in the House gallery to monitor — and possibly protest — legislative proceedings.
These last two efforts are apt to monopolize much of the legislative session, though they are expressly designed to avoid that very thing. Republicans are doing everything they can to pre-empt a repeat of last year, when both the regular legislative session and a special session that Governor Bill Lee called in August were dominated by Tennesseans who are heartsick and furious about the mass shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School last spring.
Despite the murders of three children and three staff members; despite weeks and weeks of protests; despite a call by their own governor to enact a modest red-flag law; despite becoming national pariahs for shamelessly expelling two Black representatives, Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, for engaging in a gun-reform protest in the House chamber (while simultaneously permitting white protester Gloria Johnson to keep her seat) — despite all this, the General Assembly’s Republican supermajority failed to pass any legislation that would limit access to guns in this state.
The Covenant assailant, who was being treated for an emotional disorder, nevertheless legally bought seven guns. Thanks to the inaction of Republican legislators, there is nothing to stop the next would-be assailant from doing the same thing.
In November, a man armed with a assault-style rifle walked down the street in Memphis, and parents panicked when nearby schools went into lockdown. But the man was breaking no laws. In Tennessee, it is perfectly legal to walk on a public sidewalk carrying an assault rifle. You don’t even need a permit to do it.
I held out real hope for change in the aftermath of the Covenant shooting because that tragedy, unlike so many other mass shootings, laid bare a truth which elected officials in Tennessee have long ignored: They have created a state where they aren’t safe themselves. Even whiteness and wealth, which insulate lawmakers from all manner of suffering afflicting their fellow Tennesseans, are no guarantee of safety in a state that’s flooded with guns.
For Republican leaders, this attack hit very close to home. Covenant is a private Christian school. Two of the victims were friends of Gov. Lee’s wife. Many of the Tennesseans protesting day after day at the Capitol — and in meeting after meeting throughout the summer — included gun owners who had voted for Republicans their entire adult lives. Republican leaders ignored them anyway.
In this matter of guns, as in so many other topics where public opinion diverges sharply from their own view, Republican legislators remain obdurate. Nothing will change their minds, nothing, because being an elected Republican in this country means pledging allegiance to the National Rifle Association. And little wonder: Running afoul of the gun lobby can easily cost Republicans their seats.
Thing is, that might be changing. The political landscape really might be different this year, even in a blood-red state like Tennessee. The N.R.A. is in disarray. The Tennessee General Assembly is posting its lowest approval ratings in history. Shunned by their own representatives, Republican gun-safety advocates are throwing in their lot with Democrats.
Republican voters who are sick of being routinely ignored on life-or-death issues like gun safety could well be a force that even a supermajority is unprepared to meet. They aren’t likely to vote for a Democrat, but voting for a Democrat might not be their only option. In this climate, legislators may be about to learn that a primary challenge from a proponent of common-sense gun laws is a genuine risk.
That’s why this growing coalition of new gun-safety advocates continues to give me hope. They were back at the Capitol last week — parents, teenagers, children and just about every other group, from both sides of the political aisle. They are not giving up, and so far they have not fallen prey to the political divisions that so often splinter bipartisan advocacy efforts.
In “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying In a Country of Arms,” the physician, Vanderbilt professor and gun-policy scholar Jonathan M. Metzl details the aftermath of an earlier mass shooting in Nashville, in which four young people of color were gunned down in a Waffle House restaurant by a deranged white assailant wearing nothing but an ammunition vest. In that tragedy, too, survivors and parents formed nonprofits that worked for gun safety. They, too, tried to transform their own heartbreak into legislation that would save others from the same heartbreak.
In response, the General Assembly passed an open-carry law that parents, doctors, pastors, police officers and public-health advocates collectively opposed. Instead of making Tennesseans safer, legislators created circumstances that yielded not fewer guns but more of them.
Dr. Metzl has become convinced that long-enshrined arguments for gun safety must be reconsidered and recast to move beyond traditional side-taking. Among other crucial social changes, responsible Republican gun owners need to be convinced that keeping public spaces safe does not mean taking away their guns.
The indefatigable parents of Covenant might be able to convince them. Learning from earlier survivor efforts, joining the work of gun-reform advocates on the other side of the aisle, and speaking with the survivor’s voice of moral authority, they are perfectly positioned to break through the polarities of even red-state politics. As Dr. Metzl told me, “There’s nothing like a convert to sway the conversation: ‘I was this, and now I’m this’ is a very powerful argument.” People who have changed their minds, or whose priorities have shifted in response to new information, remind us that transformation is always possible.
Perhaps most hopeful is what this model, if it works, could do to change the national conversation on guns. Because if gun reform works in a state like Tennessee, it can work anywhere. “What’s happening in Nashville now is so important to figuring out what’s next,” Dr. Metzl pointed out in our conversation. “We have to find a way to do this that’s going to guide the rest of the country.”