Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law on Friday a bill allowing teachers to carry a concealed firearm on campus. The state joins more than 30 other states that have passed similar legislation.
The logic and common sense behind such legislation is irrefutable – deranged shooters prefer gun free zones such as schools as their targets – and yet it took the state’s Republican majority lawmakers more than year following a school shooting in Nashville last year to move the bill to the governor’s desk.
On March 27, 2023, 28-year-old transgender Aiden (originally Audrey) Hale shot her way through the glass doors of The Covenant School in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville at 10:00 in the morning. By the time armed law-enforcement officials ended the massacre, three students and three adults, and the shooter, were dead.
Said Lee, a Republican: “What’s important is that we give districts tools and the option to use a tool that will keep their children safe.”
In a word, the law is optional: School districts are free to adopt the measure, or not. And those teachers who are given permission by the district to carry must themselves carry an immense personal burden to do so. They must first obtain an “enhanced” carry permit, at their own expense. They must obtain written permission not only from their school’s principal and superintendent but also from the local law-enforcement agency.
Once those hurdles have been overcome, teachers desiring to carry to defend themselves and their students must submit to a background check and a psychological evaluation. And then, if successfully passing those tests, they must complete 40 hours of basis training in school policing and another 40 hours of training in the use of a firearm approved by the state’s Peace Officer’s Standards and Training Commission.
All at their own personal expense. And these training protocols must be renewed annually, at the teachers’ own expense.
Further, once granted permission, teachers may not carry a firearm openly, and not at stadiums, gymnasiums, or auditoriums where school-sponsored events are taking place.
Representative Ryan Williams, the bill’s original sponsor, estimated that “there’s a low probability that even one-tenth of one percent [of teachers] would do this.”
According to research by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), 94 percent of all mass public shootings since 1950 have taken place in gun-free zones. Further, the CPRC has noted that “there has not been a single mass shooting in a school where staff were permitted to carry a firearm.”
Nevertheless, anti-gun groups galvanized such opposition to the bill that radicals overwhelmed security at the house and proceedings were forced to come to a halt until the galleries were cleared and order was restored. The protesters had been coached to shout “Blood on your hands!”
One of the legislators, Representative Justin Jones, who had been expelled from the chamber last year for disrupting proceedings, wrote on his X account: “This is what fascism looks like.” And Everytown for Gun Safety called the bill allowing teachers to train themselves to help protect their students from deranged potential attackers “reckless.”
It’s clear that the protesters are beyond reach through history, experience, or common sense. They are so committed to their anti-gun, anti-freedom agenda that presenting evidence that such an option might reduce the chances of another school shooting is met with blind rage.
Related article:
