On January 22, a 17 -year -old man in the neighborhood of Nasville’s Antioch entered the gymnasium lunch and shot two other students before he was deadly turning his gun on himself. One of the students escaped with grazing trauma. The other, Josselin Corea Escalante, 16 years old, died.
Antioch’s Gymnasium was equipped with multiple security measures aimed at preventing school shots: glass -resistant, software security cameras designed to detect an armed weapon, two school resource employees. Reportedly, the attacker was active in places that took advantage of the school shooters. It was suspended in autumn to threaten a pupil with a box cutter. A teacher called him “a red flag on foot”.
But none of those who were not known for the dragon and none of the security measures introduced by school was enough to save Josselin Corea Escalante.
WPLN, a Nashville NPR subsidiary, put eight journalists in history, breaking on national news with live updates throughout the day of shooting. In most other ways, the response to the tragedy of Antioch, located southeast of the center, has been erased – very different from the city’s passionate response to shooting less than two years ago at The Covenant School, a private Christian academy in the southwest side of Nashville. The shooting of the covenant took the lives of three aged 9 years and three staff members, including the headmaster.
Tennessee has one of the highest rates of firearms deaths in the country. Many of us believed that shooting the covenant could shift the hopes and factors dependent on logic, though only in moderate ways. The Lord of Covenant was a close friend of Maria Lee, the wife of Governor Bill Lee. Covenant offers a Christian education that is aligned with what Republicans want for public schools. For them, the tragedy was personal.
The protests that followed the shooting of the covenant caused several non -profit organizations whose explicit aim was to force the General Assembly to pass the legislation on weapons of common sense favoring the majority of the Tennesis. Laws on Red Signs. History checks. Periods of waiting. Safe storage of weapons. The legislators did not vote for such laws, so the ruler put them back to complete the job at a special legislative session.
I have hosted many fruitless hopes in my life, but I have never been more blatant, incredibly wrong than I was in the hope of meaningful, logical action for weapons by the Republicans.
Everyone wants to know how the minor representative of Antioch took his hands on a deadly weapon, but the detection of a weapon of a weapon in Tennessee is “a stupid project”, according to WPLN’s Paige Pfleger, whose joint research report Propublica has identified the deadly branches of Tennessee’s LAX laws. “State laws have really made, really easy to hold weapons here without any licensing procedure,” he said last week on “This is Nashville”. “History checks are not required for private sales, including online sales or weapons reports. This is not to mention the ubiquitous weapons – the weapons stolen from cars, and that is very common.”
Down here, school shots inspire weaker Laws on firearms. Following the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, when other states tighten firearms laws, Tennessee called on firearms to descend. After taking Waffle House, legislators proposed a law on open transfer opposed by parents, doctors, shepherds, police officers, public health officials-almost all. He passed anyway.
Whatever the upheaval of the hope that Governor Lee’s appeal for a special arms security meeting may have touched in 2023, the special meeting he convened last week did not inspire such illusions. Outside Statehouse, as before, hundreds of students chant “not one more!” And “Students, United, will never be separated!” But this time the ruler was in a lock step with his supermajority supermail. Progress was never an option.
This special session also dealt with schools, but not to make them safer. This time the commander does not encourage legislators to pass a Law on the Red Flag. This time he used the urgent need to relieve disasters for eastern Tennesis affected by Hurricane Helene as a way to pass through the type of school choice and immigration favored by President Trump. Equally horrible accounts are considered by states all over the South.
Tennessee’s legislators were allocated $ 447 million to reach the coupon program this year, but the program is designed to grow. At least one Republican legislator, a spokesman for Jody Barrett, is expecting a balloon cost of $ 1 billion a year over a decade, although most students who have been registered in a pilot coupon program did not do just like students in public schools.
A little weird, then, that coupons generally do not enjoy broad public support. Last year, Kentak’s voters – who, unlike the Tennesis, took the opportunity to weigh – quietly losing a measure of coupons in their state. Here in Tennessee, Governor Lee failed to attribute several democratic legislators to pass a coupon bill just last year.
However, political bullying and high expenditure from special interest groups have changed the outcome this time. In a state where public schools are subjectively subjective, Tennessee is going to spend nearly half a billion dollars to launch a program that will benefit mainly students who have already enrolled in private schools.
State minorities leader John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democratic, called on the law on the coupon “the best fraud they can buy money”. The representative Bo Mitchell, also a Nasville Democrat, referred to it as “Gov. Bill Lee Private School Kuponsourios Paralia.”
The new legislation on the migration of the special meeting, meanwhile, is almost certainly unconstitutional: making a felony for local elected officials to vote in favor of “sacred” political for immigrant Communities such as Antioch, which has a larger Latino population than any other Nashville neighborhood. Think about this for a minute: this law will turn the elected officials into criminals and will remove them from the office when just vote For a policy that Republicans oppose, it does not matter that their peers were elected to do this. The US Association of Civil Freedoms has already promised to challenge the law in court.
The Tennessee General Assembly never cares if its voters support the laws that pass through and does not care now. We are alone. Without legislative assistance to maintain weapons by the hands of dangerous people, Nashville’s school system is testing me a new arms detection system in Antioch Gymnasium. We can only pray that it is more effective than the previous system.
But he won’t bring back Josselin Corea Escalante. Josselin, who celebrated her Quinceañera in 2023. Josselin, who played football and did good points and loved his family. Josselin, whose parents have sought asylum in this country to keep it safe from violence, is gone. A Gofundme page notes that her family will send her body back to Guatemala, “where she can rest with peace surrounded by loved ones.”
