Williamson County residents, Middle Tennesseans push for gun reform ahead of special session

As the Tennessee General Assembly’s special session prepares to convene on Monday evening, gun reform advocates have been working to rally supporters across Tennessee, even in the state’s most staunch Republican enclaves like Williamson County.

Nearly a week after the March 27 Covenant School shooting in Green Hills shocked Middle Tennessee and the nation, dozens of protesters gathered on Franklin’s square to mourn the six shooting victims and call for change in Tennessee’s loosening gun laws. 

The shooting just across the county line resulted in the deaths of not just Nashville residents, but Williamson County residents as well.

Another protest took place on the square in June, with the most recent demonstration seeing dozens of residents protesting an Aug. 15 conservative event at the Franklin Library where Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District Rep. Andy Ogles and state Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson appeared together.

Johnson, a Franklin resident, said that he won’t support any form of an extreme risk protection order (ERPO) during the special session, and with many GOP elected officials in tow, public faith in any meaningful gun reform coming from the session is low. 

Johnson was challenged by some of his constituents during the Aug. 15 event, including by Williamson County resident Rod Berger who told The News that the current social environment around guns has led to new and challenging conversations with his son who is in fifth grade.

“His role is not to funnel his opinion into the legislative process, but to represent and legislate around the opinions of his constituents,” Berger said of Johnson.

“Fixed opinions rob us of the opportunity to meet real-time needs within and throughout communities across Tennessee, and we really run the risk of marginalizing an expanding electorate in a state of great growth.”

Two fixtures of the Williamson County protests have been Franklin High School graduates Jared and Caroline Sullivan, who are parents to two daughters. 

“I believe that a new day is coming to Tennessee and that a new generation is coming up, and that we can either demand that our current elected officials behave well and act in our interests or we can vote them out,” Jared Sullivan told The News.

Another local activist and 2020 Renaissance High School graduate, Brynn Jones, serves as a legal associate for March For Our Lives, a group that was founded in the wake of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the deadliest mass killing in a high school in the United States.

March For Our Lives works to “create safe and healthy communities and livelihoods where gun violence is obsolete,” with Jones helping to interview and document the stories of survivors of gun violence.

Jones has been involved in organizing and participating in numerous actions in Middle Tennessee since The Covenant School shooting, including a recent youth advocacy day on Capitol Hill which attracted dozens of students from across the state.

“Mass shootings [can] happen anywhere,” Jones said. “It doesn't matter how wealthy your community is, it doesn't matter how powerful your community is.”

Jones said that while she shares the skepticism of the special session delivering meaningful gun reform, she hopes elected officials are actually listening.

“I would urge them to think about what their constituents actually want and what their constituents actually need, and what their constituents need are safe and healthy communities.”

In July, a group of Covenant School parents and community members created two anti-violence nonprofits, Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrows and Covenant Families Action Fund, which have held more than 50 meetings with legislative offices and elected officials ahead of the special session.

“We will be direct and public about whether this special session meets our expectations of what’s needed to help make all of our kids safe,” Nonprofit co-founder Sarah Shoop Neumann said in August, adding that the group hopes that lawmakers and the general public treat the session with both “seriousness” and “respect.”

Churches and other houses of worship have also engaged in self-reflection about their response to safety concerns and the role of the faithful in addressing gun violence in their own communities. 

“When a stranger graces the door of the place where they should feel the most welcome, they are now met with suspicion and blocked entrances," Rev. Jason Mikel, pastor for Nolensville’s Jenkins Cumberland Presbyterian Church, told protesters in Franklin.

“The very people Christ told us to welcome, strangers, are questioned first for not only is our concern about their intentions; we also don’t know what vast array of weapons they have to carry out those intentions because guns are everywhere.”

On Thursday, Belle Meade United Methodist Church held a panel discussion on gun safety featuring Tenn. House District 59 Rep. Caleb Hemmer, pediatrician Dr. Kelsey Gastineau, Metro Nashville Police Department Chaplain Rev. Keri Cress and MNPD Lt. Joe Winter.

“We are hosting this event in our sacred space because we believe that people of faith should offer voice and leadership when it comes to creating a safer community,” Rev. Sam McGlothlin, senior pastor at Belle Meade UMC, said.

Cress was called in on the morning of the shooting to notify families that they had lost children in yet another chapter of this American tragedy, consoling those whose lives were forever changed on March 27.

“It was a lot of deep breaths, it was acknowledging that there was nothing that could be said or done to make that moment any better,” Cress said. 

Firearm deaths have increased in Tennessee, and often unseen consequences follow gun violence survivors for the rest of their lives, regardless of if the gun violence is intentional such as an instance of homicide or suicide, or an accidental shooting.

“These are long-lasting, lifelong injuries that kids have, and they get readmitted to the hospital with severe infections, significant pain. These are things that will last their entire lives,” Gastineau said, adding that victims, their families and communities also deal with emotional, mental, and social impacts from gun violence.

Rep. Hemmer has been working to increase laws on the safe storage of firearms since he was elected to the House of Representatives last year, specifically focusing on the nationwide issue of guns stolen from vehicles.

The morning of The Covenant School shooting he was hopeful that his work was paying off, having been featured in a New York Times article days before the attack. 

Then he received the news that his own child’s school was in lockdown in response to the nearby shooting.

Hemmer is himself a victim of gun violence when, as a student at Nashville’s John Trotwood Moore Middle School in 1994, an accidental shooting claimed the life of 13-year-old Terrance Murray in what was the first and only instance of fatal gun violence in a Metro Nashville Public School.

Williamson County resident Kari Kuefler spoke in June of her experience as a survivor of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the worst in American history, and the effects that have followed her home.

“It wasn’t just the Las Vegas community who were affected that day...those 25,000 people went to their respective communities and respective homes and those families hurt, their friends hurt,” Kuefler said.

In addition to the trauma and stress she now feels in daily life, she spoke about how the mother of 9-year-old Covenant School shooting victim Evelyn Dieckhaus worked at the Franklin school that was attended by Kuefler’s 5-year-old son.

“Five years and that tragedy comes full circle...I am reliving that violence, the connection to those survivors, and it’s touching my family in another way," Kuefler said. 

MNPD reports that more than 700 cases of guns stolen from vehicles have been reported in 2023. 

Lt. Winter said during the panel discussion that, as of Aug. 12, Nashville has seen 276 gunshot wound victims, including gunshot deaths year-to-date, with a larger but unknown number of incidents where guns are fired at occupied homes and vehicles but result in no injuries or deaths.

Semi-automatic handguns are the most common gun used in Nashville, but police are seeing an increase in the use of rifles, as well as an increase in ghost guns, which are assembled by a user and are essentially untraceable, and switches, illegal devices which convert semi-automatic handguns to automatic weapons.

Many gun reform advocates know that the path to change may be a long one, and while teachers, students, pastors, doctors and entire communities continue to mourn and reflect on the impact of gun violence, those same community members are continuing to march towards change.

“You feel powerless…But we don't let it get too hopeless, because we can't feel hopeless in this moment,” Gastineau said reflecting on her patients. “Because the second we start feeling hopeless, we allow children to keep dying in vain, and we will not ever allow that to happen.”