Back when Margo Price wrote her essay “Sit Beside Me in the Darkness” about Tennessee’s response to the Covenant School shooting, she was (as we all were) under the impression that Gov. Bill Lee would call a special session to address gun violence in July. Now it’s supposedly going to happen in the middle of August. Maybe it won’t happen at all.
In her essay, Price writes of meeting the governor:
But in my eyes, the governor has continually supported bills and laws that have harmed women, trans people, and many others — and me lashing out at him in anger might not be the best strategy. In our meeting, I interrupted him and extended an olive branch. “I’m sorry for the poisonous things I’ve said about you on the internet. My children have suffered nightmares post shooting,” I continued, tears flowing freely from my eyes. “They were close to Covenant on the day of the shooting, and I was so angry. I lost a child nearly a decade ago, and it’s not a pain I would wish on even my greatest enemy. I know that you and your wife lost someone you love that day, and I want to offer my condolences. Truly, I am sorry for your loss. I am also frequently bullied online, so I understand how it feels to be berated in comments.”
There was a pause. “Thank you for saying that,” he replied. He, along with others in the room, were visibly taken aback. I went on by saying, “Even my far-right, gun-owning, Republican relatives are ready for gun reform in Tennessee. We don’t get along about much of anything, but they are fed up, too. This is your chance to be the good guys.”
Jesus Christ, if this is the peace and insight psychedelics can grant a person, I’m going out to the backyard to eat all the mushrooms I can find. I could not extend kindness to our governor — who has overseen the deaths, percentage-wise, of as many Tennesseans as Andrew Johnson did during the Civil War. His “everyone’s so mean to me” schtick while he runs around being thoughtlessly cruel grates on my nerves.
This week, we got to see it on full display as Lee continues to push for the writings of the Covenant killer to be released. WKRN reports:
“I mean, it’s hard to express to the parents opinions about anything,” he said. “They alone know the pain that their families have endured and the difficulty and struggles of that. I can’t understand that. I can understand it’s a very bad situation for them. I continue to believe Tennesseans need clarity about this.”
When pressed about what “clarity” means, Lee said it is in regard to why information has not come forward and releasing information if it’s appropriate. A special legislative session on public safety is set to begin on Aug. 21, although the governor has not officially called it yet.
I genuinely do not know what could be clearer than little children dead in their school, their bodies riddled with bullets. His friend was killed. How could that be any clearer?
The point of releasing the killer’s writings isn’t to clarify anything. It’s to muddy the waters. Here’s what we know: A troubled person whose own family was working to make sure they were unarmed was able to get guns. In spite of the school being locked, people on staff being armed, the kids inside being taught “Christian values” and, by virtue of it being private, the school being immune from the problems of public schools, the killer was still able to get inside and shoot people. Beloved people.
Many of us — most of us, in fact — want it to be harder for deeply troubled people to get guns. We believe that, if it weren't so easy for deeply troubled people to get guns, it wouldn’t be so easy for them to murder the people we love. That also is very clear.
There are so many things that gun owners could do to aid in this. They could make sure their guns are locked in their cars and trucks. They could report their guns stolen when they’re stolen. They could store their guns at home in gun safes. These things wouldn’t even require laws to achieve. We just need gun owners to insist on a culture of gun safety in their communities and to lead by example.
And we could pass some very basic laws that make it harder for people who shouldn’t have guns to get them.
This is all clear.
Everything else is obscuring. Oh, we can’t have a legislative session on guns until we see the Covenant killer’s manifesto? Why not? Because Republicans really want to make this a circus about how demented trans people are instead, and being able to pore over these writings would help gin that up? To what end? Because it’s more popular on the right to vicariously villainize trans people than it is to address our gun problem?
It's clear as day that Republicans would rather get way, way into the weeds on the specific psychological makeup of this shooter, but the killer is dead. The shooter is not going to go on to shoot any more people. Making laws tailored specifically to only address these exact circumstances means making laws that will do nothing going forward, since the person who would have been thwarted has already acted and is already dead.
But the other obscuring thing that is happening is an obscenity. By directly linking the special session to the release of the killer’s writings, that makes the people standing in the way of the release of the killer’s writings responsible for the lack of the special session. In other words, if legislators will only have a special session if the writings are released, and if the governor is out here pushing the Covenant community to allow their release, then if they aren’t released, the lack of a special session is the Covenant parents’ fault.
This is vile.
I have deeply mixed feelings about the release of these writings, and I go back and forth about what the right thing to do is. Yes, I believe the public has the right to know, and I believe law enforcement files should be open to review by the taxpayers. And thus I believe that the public has a right to see the killer’s writings.
But I also see this from the families’ perspective. Their loved ones died. Releasing the writings changes the public conversation from the loss of these people to a focus on the shooter and decrypting his writings. That sucks. Also, if the shooter did go into detail about planning the shooting, the Covenant community will face a new nightmare of fearing that their tragedy could be used as blueprints for a next one. The families also probably know that releasing the writings will change the conversation from “What can we do about guns?” to “What can we do about trans people?”
If we make the Covenant families responsible for politicians’ refusal to do anything about guns, if the writings aren't released, are we also making them responsible for whoever uses the writings as inspiration if they are released? What a shitty position to put our neighbors in, after they’ve already suffered so much. And in that way, I believe we should respect their desire to not make the writings public. We don’t actually need the writings in order to act on guns. That’s just Republicans trying to make their reluctance to act someone else’s responsibility.
And the fact that the governor would in any way help shift the responsibility for gun reform off his party and onto the Covenant families makes me sick to my stomach. Like I said, he can complain all he wants about people being mean to him, but damn, he’s just being matched by the energy he puts into this state.
