The Walking Dead

Gun Lobby Zombies in Tennessee

There are very few American horrors your Freakshow guide will not show you. One of them is the school shooting. I once covered one of these incidents in person and I won’t do it again. I lack the sterner stuff it takes to witness what happens after sickos massacre babies with too-easily available military grade weapons. But I can lead you behind the greasy ferris wheel to the gross spectacle of the hypocritical, amoral gun-lovin’ political Freakshow.

This week, let’s mosey down to a Republican-controlled state Capitol that bans political signs but welcomes loaded firearms. Tennessee’s Republican governor has called the legislature into a special session on gun violence in the wake of the Covenant Christian School massacre last spring in which six people died, including three students.

Tennessee troopers removing the public from a legislative session on gun violence

Lawmakers are using this occasion to do absolutely nothing for child safety, but taking the opportunity to go full fascist. Weeping members of the public have been frog-marched out while zombies of the gun lobby push their dream agenda. One of their proposals would allow “enhanced handgun carry” permit holders, all active or retired military, and law enforcement, to carry handguns into public schools and on public school grounds without school administration's knowledge or approval. Its chief sponsor assured reporters that the bill welcomes weapons at school sporting events and field trips too!

Tennessee Republicans, with a supermajority in the House, have also proposed new laws to redefine mass shootings to a higher number and to silence dissent. In the Republican-controlled Senate, committee members, in a single 30-second meeting, blocked nine moderate, commonsense gun control bills, including a measure that would have allowed schools to file an order of protection against a person who made threats against students and staff.

GOP lawmakers have proposed to redefine “mass shooting” under the state law (with the obvious aim of lowering Tennessee’s death count by gun). The proposal will increase to four the required number of corpses to qualify as a mass shooting. The new definition excludes domestic violence murders: killing ten family members would not be counted as a mass shooting. The same lawmakers want to keep gun-massacred children’s autopsies from the public.

“This would be a lot more compelling if these guys didn’t think ‘the work people sent us here to do’ was arming teachers, locking up juveniles, and bullying moms w/the temerity to hold up paper signs,” said Sen. Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville. “But sure enough, we should be doing more real work around here.”

The special session is still ongoing but, according to The Tennessean, “GOP leaders are not expected to take up gun control despite the governor’s push for legislation to keep guns away from people deemed to pose harm to themselves or others.”

American children who don’t experience a shooting will grow up remembering the terror of active shooter drills in school. For more than a decade, they have been singing along and dancing to a tune called Pumped Up Kicks about a school shooter. The Foster The People song is about a guy who finds “a six shooter gun/In his dad's closet, oh in a box of fun things” and now he’s coming for the kids.

The catchy refrain (my kids sang along to this when they were preteens) is:

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You'd better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You'd better run, better run, faster than my bullet

This is utter insanity. We know it, we feel it and yet are helpless to do anything as we witness over and over the servility of so-called leaders to the gun merchants, the gun fetishists and AR-15 and ammo-hoarding fanatics and their lobby. The pain of the families of the massacred, from Sandy Hook to Uvalde and Parkland and all the others in between, is unimaginable. I also feel sorry for people who must face the carnage, the teachers, cops, EMTs.

I salute the advocates who get up every day and try to get American leaders to do the right thing. One of these heroes is Shannon Watts, who the day after the Sandy Hook massacre, founded Moms Demand Action. I asked her to share her thoughts on the Tennessee Freakshow. Here’s what Shannon told me.

“Right-wing lawmakers in Tennessee have — for years — boldly sacrificed the lives of children on the altar of gun industry profits. Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature has made the state a haven for gun manufacturers by giving them millions of dollars in tax breaks and then passing laws to fill their coffers. As far back as 2013, Tennessee lawmakers passed a law referred to as “guns in trunks,” allowing gun owners to carry in their cars. And as recently as 2021, at the behest of the NRA, they passed a law allowing the permitless carry of handguns.

“Right now in Tennessee, Republican lawmakers believe they can act with impunity, and they’ll continue to do so until they start losing their jobs. If you want proof, look no further than the GOP lawmakers who had state troopers drag white women out of a committee hearing in Nashville for the crime of silently holding up protest signs. As Brittany Packnett Cunningham has said, “Your whiteness will not save you from what patriarchy has in store for you.”

Before you go, please consider this fact, which needs no embellishment from me, or anyone: Gun violence is the leading cause of death of American children and teens.

RELATED

Foster The People song

Redefining mass shooting

Hiding children’s autopsies

Blocking debate on orders of protection

Welcome firearms on field trips

SOUNDING THE DEPTHS

Audio of Trump yelling at Raffensberger to steal the election should be required viewing for all Americans.