On Jan. 22, a 17-year-old in the Antioch neighborhood of Nashville entered his high school’s lunchroom and shot two other students before fatally turning the gun on himself. One of the students escaped with a graze wound. The other, Josselin Corea Escalante, 16, died.
Antioch High School was fitted with multiple safety measures intended to thwart school shootings: shatter-resistant glass, security cameras with software designed to detect a brandished weapon, two school resource officers stationed on campus. Reportedly radicalized by far-right propaganda online, the assailant was active on sites that valorized school shooters. He was suspended in the fall for threatening a student with a box cutter. One teacher called him a “walking red flag.”
But none of what was known about the gunman and none of the safety measures enacted by the school were enough to save Josselin Corea Escalante.
WPLN, Nashville’s NPR affiliate, put eight journalists on the story, breaking into national newscasts with live updates throughout the day of the shooting. In most other ways, response to the tragedy in Antioch, which lies southeast of downtown, has been muted — very different from the city’s passionate response to a shooting less than two years ago at the Covenant School, a private Christian academy on Nashville’s southwest side. The Covenant shooting took the lives of three 9-year-olds and three staff members, including the school principal.
Tennessee has one of the highest rates of firearm deaths in the country. A lot of us thought the Covenant shooting might shift the hopes-and-prayers contingent toward reason, if only in modest ways. Covenant’s principal was a close friend of Maria Lee, the wife of Gov. Bill Lee. Covenant offers a Christian education that aligns with what Republicans want for the state’s public schools. For them, the tragedy was personal.
The protests that followed the Covenant shooting engendered several nonpartisan organizations whose explicit goal was to force the General Assembly to pass the common-sense gun legislation that a majority of Tennesseans favor. Red-flag laws. Background checks. Waiting periods. Safe gun storage. Legislators passed no such laws, so the governor hauled them back to finish the job in a special legislative session.
I have harbored many fruitless hopes in my life, but I have never been more flagrantly, hideously wrong than I was in holding out hope for meaningful, reasonable action on guns from Republicans.
Everybody wants to know how the underage Antioch shooter got his hands on a deadly weapon, but tracing the provenance of a gun in Tennessee is “a fool’s errand,” according to WPLN’s Paige Pfleger, whose joint investigative reporting with ProPublica has tracked the deadly ramifications of Tennessee’s lax gun laws. “State laws have made it really, really easy to possess guns here without any permitting process,” she said last week on “This Is Nashville.” “Background checks are not required for private sales, including sales online or at gun shows. That’s not to mention the ubiquity of guns — guns stolen from cars, and that’s very common.”
Down here, school shootings inspire weaker gun laws. In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, when other states were tightening gun laws, Tennessee invited gun manufacturers to come on down. After the Waffle House shooting, legislators proposed an open-carry law that was opposed by parents, physicians, pastors, police officers, public-health officials — just about everybody. It passed anyway.
Whatever flickers of hope that Governor Lee’s call for a special session on gun safety may have stirred in 2023, the special session he convened last week inspired no such illusions. Outside the statehouse, as before, hundreds of students were chanting “Not one more!” and “Students, united, will never be divided!” But this time the governor was in lock step with his hard-line supermajority. Progress was never even an option.
This special session was also concerned with schools, but not to make them safer. This time the governor wasn’t urging legislators to pass a red-flag law. This time he was cravenly using the urgent need to pass disaster relief for East Tennesseans affected by Hurricane Helene as a way to ram through the kind of school-choice and immigration legislation favored by President Trump. Equally horrible bills are being considered by statehouses across the South.
Tennessee legislators allocated $447 million to get the voucher program up and running this year, but the program is designed to grow. At least one Republican legislator, Representative Jody Barrett, expects costs to balloon to $1 billion a year within a decade, even though most students currently enrolled in a voucher pilot program did not perform as well as students in public schools did.
Little wonder, then, that vouchers in general don’t enjoy wide public support. Last year Kentucky voters — who, unlike Tennesseans, were given a chance to weigh in — soundly defeated a voucher measure in their state. Here in Tennessee, Governor Lee failed to corral enough Republican legislators to pass a voucher bill just last year.
But political intimidation and heavy spending by out-of-state special interest groups changed the outcome this time. In a state where public schools are chronically underfunded, Tennessee is about to spend nearly half a billion public dollars to launch a program that will benefit mainly students already enrolled in private schools.
The State House minority leader, John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democrat, called the voucher law “the best scam that money can buy.” Representative Bo Mitchell, also a Nashville Democrat, referred to it as the “Gov. Bill Lee Private School Voucher Bribery Scam Subsidy Act.”
The special session’s new immigration legislation, meanwhile, is almost certainly unconstitutional: By making it a felony for local elected officials to vote in favor of “sanctuary” policies for immigrants, the law will make it harder for Tennesseans of conscience to protect diverse communities like Antioch, which has a larger Latino population than any other Nashville neighborhood. Think about that for just a minute: This law will turn elected officials into felons, and will remove them from office, when they merely vote for a policy that Republicans oppose, never mind that their own constituents elected them to do that very thing. The American Civil Liberties Union has already vowed to challenge the law in court.
The Tennessee General Assembly has never cared whether its constituents support the laws it passes, and it doesn’t care now. We are on our own. With no legislative help in keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people, the Nashville school system is piloting a new weapons-detection system at Antioch High School. We can only pray it’s more effective than the earlier system was.
But it will not bring back Josselin Corea Escalante. Josselin, who celebrated her quinceañera in 2023; Josselin, who played soccer and made good grades and loved her family; Josselin, whose parents sought asylum in this country to keep her safe from violence, is gone. A GoFundMe page notes that her family will send her body back to Guatemala, “where she can rest in peace surrounded by loved ones.”