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Posts tagged ‘COVENANT SCHOOL’

Tennessee Democrat Expelled for Rousing a Literal Mob Accuses Republicans Of ‘Mobocracy’


BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 23, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/23/tennessee-democrat-expelled-for-rousing-a-literal-mob-accuses-republicans-of-mobocracy/

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Tennessee Democrat Rep. Justin Pearson, who was expelled from his position for inciting an “insurrection” in the state Capitol, is now complaining to corporate media that Republicans are enlisting mob rule to once again stifle a leftist-led gun grab in the Volunteer State.

“I wonder what you make of the fact that the people of your state who you were standing up for would like to see some gun safety legislation, and the Republicans are ignoring the will of the majority,” MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asked Pearson in an interview on Tuesday.

“Our democracy is in peril and the reality is we have people in the state of Tennessee Republican Party who are much more interested in turning our democracy into their ‘mobocracy,’ where mob rules,” the 28-year-old replied.

Pearson’s comments are ironic considering he was one of the “Tennessee Three” representatives who encouraged a mob in the chamber gallery in March to bully legislators into passing restrictive gun control laws. Their attempts to rouse the rowdy crowd with jeers, taunts, and chants of “no action, no peace” were met with swift accountability from the General Assembly, which voted to boot Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones from the House days later.

At the time, Democrats all over the nation, including President Joe Biden, and the corporate media condemned the committee removals and ejections as “racist,” an erosion of “democratic norms,” and the “latest GOP move to stifle dissent,” even though Pearson and Jones were reinstated to their positions less than a week later.

Now, Pearson says Republicans’ fight to keep Gov. Bill Lee’s red flag law proposal and other unconstitutional gun policies off of the books in their state also constitutes undemocratic behavior.

“We are seeing in state legislature after state legislature the erosion of our democracy and so I’m deeply concerned about what is happening here in Tennessee, under the leadership of this extremist Republican Party of Cameron Sexton and William Lambert,” Pearson told Wallace.

Pearson specifically took issue with Republicans’ attempts to secure the state Capitol against another bout of unrest during their August special session.

“We are seeing that quite literally in the rules that are being passed that have now prohibited our own constituents from coming into session and holding a sign that says, ‘Protect kids not guns’ or that says, ‘Am I next?’ — that has now been banned during this special session,” Pearson said. “In fact, pieces of paper have more regulation than guns in our state.”

His colleague Jones joined in with a video posted to social media claiming that “The Guns Over People (GOP) Caucus has put more work into limiting the voices of the People and keeping them out of the Tennessee Capitol then listening to their demands for common sense gun laws.”

Corporate Media Really Want Gun Control in Tennessee Too

Pearson and Jones aren’t the only ones using empty definitions of “democracy” to browbeat and guilt-trip their legislative colleagues into doing their bidding when it comes to firearms. Desperate pleas for gun control littered front pages on Monday morning as the state chambers convened for the special session. Even Wallace’s initial question to Pearson indicated she believed Tennessee Republicans who refuse to infringe on the Second Amendment are in the wrong. Mere days before the special session began, The Washington Post published a feature of Melissa Alexander, the mother of a student who survived the Covenant School shooting.

“She’s a Republican gun owner. Now she’s pleading with GOP lawmakers for change,” the headline states.

The article claims that the only thing standing in the way of gun control activists like Alexander is “a powerful Republican-supermajority legislature that has resisted demands that lawmakers say infringe on rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.”

“Grieving Governor’s Moderate Gun Proposal Is Spurned by G.O.P. Allies,” The New York Times also lamented once it became clear Republicans would focus more on mental health and safe gun storage than restricting Americans’ constitutional rights.

Local outlets such as The Tennessean published op-eds calling for Tennessee lawmakers to “listen to children about their gun violence fears.”

Missing from the front pages of these publications was any mention of polls suggesting that a majority of Tennesseans want current gun laws enforced instead of adding new laws to the books.

The specific gun law pushed by activists, Lee, Democrats like Pearson, and now the propaganda press is far from “moderate.” As my colleague Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi noted during the legislation’s debut in April, a law deeming someone who has a “psychiatric disorder” or “serious behavioral condition” eligible to lose his Second Amendment rights for 180 days or more is an “unconstitutional travesty.”

Lee’s failure to clarify whether transgenderism, the radical gender ideology that possessed the Covenant School shooter who murdered six, counts as a “psychological disorder” only furthered the GOP’s case against passing such a sweeping law.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Bill Lee’s Red Flag Proposal Is an Unconstitutional Travesty


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | APRIL 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/20/bill-lees-red-flag-proposal-is-an-unconstitutional-travesty/

Gov. Bill Lee
The Tennessee governor confuses do-something-ism with bravery.

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Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is asking lawmakers to support “new legislation that would temporarily block someone who is deemed a threat to themselves or to others from having guns,” writes Axios.

That’s one way of putting it.

Another, more precise, way would be to say Lee supports a law that forces people accused of a precrime to sit down with state-appointed psychiatrists and lawyers and prove their innocence before the government decides if they can keep their guns. If that person says the wrong things, cops can show up at his home, search it, demand the accused hand over his property — not just any property, but property explicitly protected by the Constitution — without offering any evidence that he’s committed, or ever planned to commit, a crime.

In selling his bill, Lee claims that guns can be taken from those accused of having a “psychiatric disorder, alcohol dependence, or drug dependence.” But federal law already prohibits the sale of a gun to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective.” And most people who drink or take drugs don’t have a propensity towards violence. Excessive drinking might be bad for you, but it’s legal. As is grumbling about chemtrails, pondering how to overthrow the government, and hating your neighbors.

Incidentally, if an alcoholic is found guilty of a precrime, Lee’s bill only affords him a single hearing to rectify the situation for each act of suspension, which can be in effect for up to 180 days — even if he pulls his life together, repents, and becomes a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. The state can keep asking for extensions in perpetuity.

Of course, even those with persistent depression, an emotional disorder, aren’t often would-be killers. One in eight Americans takes antidepressants. Yet, one suspects laws like this will only stigmatize depression and make gun owners less inclined to seek help.

More importantly, though, Lee fails to mention in his factsheets that the bill allows the state to take firearms on the basis of a “serious behavioral condition,” which includes “functional impairment that substantially interferes with or limits the person’s role or functioning in family, school, occupational, or community activities.” The incredulous italics are mine, because Lee’s standard, despite his contention that there is a high burden of proof, could include basically anyone who’s met the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for depression and stopped going to a weekly softball game.   

Sure, the law includes penalties for false and bad-faith statements by cops and third parties, but those would be all but impossible to prove or prosecute because the basis for the state issuing a “temporary mental health order of protection” is extraordinarily broad.

If someone is threatening others with violence, Tennessee already has numerous laws on the books that allow for arrest. It already has a law that allows for the immediate detention of people deemed dangerous to themselves or others. Every state does. And yet, in numerous recent mass shootings, the perpetrator has been known to the police, and they did nothing.

The Covenant School shooting, Lee maintains, makes it impossible not to act. But it’s important to remember that, as far as we know, nothing in Lee’s proposal would have stopped that shooter. The mother, who never appears to have reported her daughter for mental illness, probably wasn’t even aware that her adult child still owned guns. As far as we know, the killer never threatened anyone publicly before the shooting, nor did she pose a danger to herself. For all we know, the shooting was an act of terrorism or conducted over some personal grudge. We won’t know until, or if, the sheriff in Nashville releases her manifesto.

One suspects that gun controllers will soon cook up studies to tell us red flag laws are amazing, but to this point no major study — including a meta-analysis conducted by RAND Corporation — has conclusively found them to be effective. Many of these state laws are even worse than Lee’s proposal as they are permitted ex parte orders. But even if these laws were useful on the margins, they are a serious attack on the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.  Red flag laws just give authorities power to work around normal evidentiary standards. Perhaps we should try upholding the tens of thousands of laws that already govern gun ownership before passing new ones.

In his platitude-laden Twitter video, Lee frames himself as a courageous nonpartisan, accusing anyone who opposes his proposal of being blinded by politics. The truth is, the governor’s do-something-ism is about the laziest, most politically motivated breed of leadership imaginable.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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As Moral Relativism Replaces Christian Values, Americans Will Suffer More Mass Shootings


BY: KATHLEEN BUSTAMANTE | APRIL 03, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/03/as-moral-relativism-replaces-christian-values-americans-will-suffer-more-mass-shootings/

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The devolution of American society began when moral relativism supplanted biblical truth in education, government, and eventually the family.

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The devolution of American society began when moral relativism supplanted biblical truth in education, government, and the family. Beginning in the late 1940s with the Supreme Court’s Everson v. Board of Education ruling and onward, our government and educational system have turned their backs on absolute truth to embrace Marxism, which aims to remove Christianity from all spheres of society.

The moral erosion proves obvious in a recent Barna poll that found, “Millennials are significantly less likely to believe in the existence of absolute moral truth or that God is the basis of all truth.”

The study also noted that “Millennials have less respect for life, in general,” and that “they are less than half as likely as other adults to say that life is sacred. They are twice as likely to diminish the value of human life by describing human beings as either ‘material substance only’ or their very existence as ‘an illusion.’”

Millennials’ disregard for life or morality should not come as a surprise. The decreasing number of young Americans who attend church regularly hear from pastors who may not preach biblical truth. A study by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that only 51 percent of America’s evangelical church pastors hold a biblical worldview. 

Armed with this data, I am thankful that recent shootings like those at The Covenant School in Nashville and the school shooting in Uvalde do not occur more frequently.

Gun-control advocates, the media, politicians, and my friends on social media urge increased gun restrictions as the solution to the problem, pointing to Europe and Australia as the golden standard for gun control. Yet, a 2018 New Zealand Herald article showed that despite tighter gun restrictions in these countries, shootings have occurred more frequently than Americans realize.

In 2022, for example, a gunman killed two and wounded seven people in Denmark, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in Europe, before authorities apprehended him and held him for psychological testing. The article, along with anti-firearm advocates, suggests increased psychological testing as the next solution now that radical gun-control policies have failed.

Not many in Western society honestly address the origin behind increased psychological problems. Western countries increasingly lean on modern mental health mantras rather than dealing with the heart of the matter.

For centuries, firearms have been a standard tool for hunting and home defense in America and Europe. So why the escalation of gun-related massacres throughout the United States and the West over recent decades? Again, I pose the heart of the issue: Moral relativism has replaced the truth of God’s Word.

As a college writing professor, I read and hear the anti-American and anti-Christian propaganda to which my students have been exposed their entire lives. Basic biblical truths such as “treat others how you wish to be treated” and “love your neighbor” have been replaced with mantras like “treat others with kindness unless they offend you” and “love yourself.”

How can a society that raises children devoid of the Christ-centered teachings of Christianity expect anything besides massacres at the hands of miserable, self-centered, and horribly confused individuals like the Uvalde and Highland Park shooters?

Gun Control to Mask Moral Decline

Seven years ago, I attended an active-shooter training hosted by the campus safety department at the community college where I taught in Portland, Oregon. I will never forget the cautionary advice shared by one of the presenters.

“In the event of an active shooter situation, don’t bother calling campus police. Instead, call 911,” he advised. “Campus police at this college are unarmed, so we won’t be able to ensure your safety. Although it will take the local police department much longer to respond to a campus shooting, they will eventually be able to take down a shooter if the need arises.”

Baffled, I asked why campus police are expected to perform their duties unarmed. He explained that several years prior, a college board member felt distressed about campus police carrying firearms. After a swift vote by the board, my safety as well as the safety of my students and colleagues would be jeopardized henceforth.

After the training, I stayed behind to ask the officer his opinion regarding faculty arming themselves on campus. He encouraged me — off the record, of course — to carry concealed for my own safety and for the safety of my students. That college, like most academic institutions across the country, proclaims itself to be a gun-free zone.

A 2019 CNN article documented 10 years of school shootings, and the majority occurred in gun-free zones. A 2019 study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that in schools across the U.S. that reportedly allow teachers to carry guns on campus, no deaths occurred as a result of shootings between 2000 and 2018.

Neither the problem nor the solution to school shootings has any correlation with guns or mental health problems that can be treated with medication and therapy, as many scholars and pundits contend. Rather, the problem stems from our nation’s replacement of biblical truth with moral relativism.

A Symptom, Not the Cause

As a writing instructor for 16 years, I examined thousands of essays, gaining an unusual window into the lives and experiences of my Millennial and Gen Z students. Like an airline passenger who shares intimate details with a stranger, knowing he will never see that passenger again, many of my students confide personal musings and revelations in their writing.

A surprising number of essays I read unwrap students’ deep suffering related to childhood sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. Some of my students suffer the scars of drug- or alcohol-addicted, neglectful parents. Some students are only a few months clean and sober themselves. Several are homeless. And over the past decade, they write increasingly about gender confusion.

I have detected a common theme throughout their stories. Each of these unique souls is in search of something specific, a need inherent in every human. The agonizing part is that an ancient moral and religious tradition understands their needs, but they do not.

Instead of the moral relativism they have been fed from kindergarten through college, they need to hear truth. Not the “find your own truth” nonsense propagated by educators, Hollywood, and hosts on “The View,” but rather the age-old truth found solely in the Word of God.

The solution is clear: Churches must put away social justice-centered and seeker-friendly sermons and return to expository teaching. Parents must roll up their sleeves and remove the responsibility of parenting from educators and the media by doing the hard work themselves. And voters must stop expecting the government to fix a problem created by sinful humanity.

Instead, we must repent and ask God to point our nation to truth.

Kathleen Bustamante is a freelance writer and former college writing instructor. Her writing has appeared in the American Spectator, the American Conservative, the American Thinker, Real Clear Religion, and James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

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