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New Tennessee bill could help stop school shootings

Glock Model 21" by Michael @ NW Lens is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.

I have an amazing career. I’m fortunate to have been able to turn my passions into my profession and I won’t pretend I’m not. That said, there are downsides to this line of work.

One is having to write about mass shootings, particularly school shootings.

I’m a parent, so I always imagine what I’d do if that were at one of my kids’ schools. It also makes me glad we started homeschooling, but that’s a different topic.

As a nation, we spend a lot of time talking about how to prevent them.

In Tennessee, a new bill would likely do wonders to prevent school shootings in the state.

A new bill filed in the Tennessee General Assembly will allow for more people to carry guns onto school campuses.

Sen. Joey Hensley (R—Hohenwald) introduced the bill this week. SB0827 would amend certain provisions of state law prohibiting any firearms from being carried on school campuses or in public parks, instead opting for more narrowly tailored language prohibiting firearms “inside a school” building that offers kindergarten through 12th grade instruction.

The bill would allow any adult who is legally permitted to carry a firearm to bring that gun onto any public school property, including elementary, middle and high school grounds, events on school campuses and all public colleges and universities.

Now, I’m probably becoming a little overly excited. After all, this isn’t a true campus carry bill, nor does it permit armed teachers.

What the bill does is allow people to leave their firearms in their cars on school property so long as they’re not students.

Yet it’s still a useful step.

There have been school shootings that ended because an adult grabbed the gun they kept in their car, after all, and having a firearm handy would be useful. Further, potential mass shooters would have to account for the possibility that someone would have fairly ready access to a gun, thus being able to put an end to the rampage.

So yeah, I really do think this may prevent school shootings.

Is it as good as I’d like to see? Not really, and I think a bill that would allow teachers and other adults to carry on school campuses would not just be better, but ultimately passable in a state like Tennessee.

Yet despite that, this is still a positive step forward and one that will likely be useful to millions of people throughout the state. After all, imagine you’re going about your day, your gun attached to your belt in whatever manner you prefer, then you get a call. You need to come by your child’s school because they’re sick.

This means you have to go inside the building. The problem is that you have a gun on your person. Under current law, just leaving it in the car is a crime. This removes that provision.

The truth is that this shouldn’t even be part of the law. Your vehicle is your property. The courts have ruled that direction repeatedly, particularly with regard to Fourth Amendment protections. So it would seem to me that saying you can’t have a firearm in your vehicle because of where it’s parked for a time is a problem.

Not only will parents benefit, but so will teachers. In addition to having the means to stop school shootings if need be, they’ll also have the opportunity to have the means of defending themselves available while going to and from work. As things stand currently, that appears to be an issue.

Putting an end to that is a good thing, even if there’s never an impact on school shootings.

But I still believe there will be.