From time to time in this line of work, finding stories is a little tricky. That’s because some things happen that drown out everything else, what I call “sucking all the air out of the room.”

A prime example of this is the special session in the Tennessee legislature.

When looking for stories, most of them are variations of the same things about the special session. They’re worth a single story, at most, not a whole day’s worth of work.

So, we have to find other stories.

Yet it seems that despite the plethora of stories on the Tennessee legislature and the surrounding circus, some people need to make connections to it with stories that are completely unrelated.

Take this one from Fox News, titled, “Loaded gun found in Tennessee high school student’s backpack amid ongoing legislative debate on gun control.”

An officer found a loaded gun in a Tennessee high school student’s backpack Wednesday as debate continued in a special session Gov. Bill Lee called in response to the Nashville school shooting in March.

A Montgomery County school resource officer removed the handgun and two loaded magazines from the backpack of student involved in an altercation with two other students at Kenwood High School in Clarksville, a statement from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said.

…

Meanwhile, Republican leaders at the statehouse 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 and people in attendance with signs urging gun control.

Now, let’s look at what happened.

A kid puts a gun in his backpack–we don’t know how old the kid was, but he was a high school student, which means he wasn’t old enough to buy a handgun in the first place–and carries it to school, which is against the law in Tennessee.

What about this incident had anything to do with the special session?

Yes, it’s happening around the same time, but there aren’t really any bills being considered that would impact this kind of thing. After all, it’s already illegal and no one seems to be suggesting we change that, so I’m at a loss what one has to do with the other.

Unless, of course, the purpose of this link is to try and pressure those Republican lawmakers into actually passing gun control. I’d like to think Fox is above such things, but I’ve been too much from them recently to be able to make that assumption.

The two incidents are unrelated and irrelevant to one another. Things like this are why I believe in coincidence, actually. One had nothing to do with the other, but due to a quirk of timing, they sort of look like they should be linked, even though there’s no evidence they are.

Let’s be honest, this is a local story at best. Linking it to the special session is the only reason this remotely looks like a national story, but since that link is really non-existent, it’s not good reporting. It’s not news. It’s a joke.