The Major Differences Between January 6th and the Student Gun Control Protest in Tennessee

The speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, in his move to expel two Democratic representatives for their participation in a demonstration on behalf of gun control legislation compared this protest to January 6, 2021 in the nation's capital in justifying his actions to expel the two members.  My response to that, after reading about the whole incident, initially, is rage.  He's venting partisan anger at the fact that his party resorted to violence on January 6th, against first responders, and is being held accountable for it.  So this is tit for tat, so to speak, aimed at more than just the protest.  

He can be a partisan bully in Tennessee, a Republican majority state with a totally gerrymandered legislature that gives them a two-thirds super-majority to squelch any minority initiative.  I'm sure he thought he was being a good Republican, with a little bit of a racial edge.  But there are some potential pitfalls in what the Republicans did, and especially in his comments equating the event with January 6th. 

There are some big differences, huge, that a 6th grader can see, especially one that just survived a shooting in their school.  

The dead in Nashville, six of them, including three students, a school administrator, a substitute teacher and a custodian, were killed at the school that was peppered with assault rifle ammunition.  No one died at the state capitol, no law enforcement officers were injured, no one defecated or urinated on the floor, no one shouted out threats to hang anyone, no one jabbed anyone with sharpened flagpoles bearing political slogans.  They came, they protested, they were heard, they got some publicity and that made the speaker angry.  

There's an Image Problem Here

The protests were prompted by a shooting in a private school, operated by an Evangelical church, a mostly-white school in a white neighborhood.  In spite of attempts to label the shooting as an attack perpetrated by the culture war, an angry transgender person taking out their anger on a Christian school, it was not that at all.  In fact, this fit the pattern of most school shootings, involving a shooter familiar with the school as a former student, not as a culture warrior attacking a perceived enemy.  This wasn't an attack on a secular, public school, too liberal to have people with gun-carry permits on campus, where a student went crazy because of circumstances related to the school's lack of discipline.  This was a former student whose psychological problems that led to the shooting developed on conservative, Evangelical Christian, Republican political turf.  

And that has to have put some pressure on legislators who are always monitoring public opinion after events like this to see how it affects their position.  The protests, which have brought this issue right into the legislature, have also served to put pressure on the legislators.  So, the speaker took unprecedented, and in my opinion, completely unwarranted action against three Democratic legislators.  And the January 6th rhetoric he spewed is an intentional distraction.  

I doubt very many of the compliant, rubber-stamping Republicans in the Tennessee house gave any thought at all to potential implications that would come as a result of the rhetoric, their actions, and from the shooting and protest itself when they were casting their ballots.  But there's been an awful lot of attention drawn to their actions, on a national scale, especially when their votes expelled the two black male members, but did not reach the necessary threshold to expel the white, female member.  That got jumped on right away, not only in the media, but among those who have the power to demand accountability for something that appears to be racially motivated.  

The comparison to January 6th wasn't a good public relations move either, especially since it is obvious, even to many Republicans and most independents in Tennessee, that there was nothing to compare.  

An Open Question

All of this happening within a couple of short weeks has made for quite a story.  The Tennessee legislature's lack of action on gun control and regulation led to the very preventable deaths of six Tennesseans, in a school operated by an Evangelical Christian church, on heavily Republican turf.  The have no one else to blame for this one, and public opinion is moving to hold them accountable for this.  So of course the GOP speaker is going to find as many distractions, and "whatabouts" as he can to try and justify their failure to protect the state's citizens from gun violence.  

Getting back to the question at hand, exactly what, Mr. Speaker, is your legislature going to do to prevent another such shooting in Nashville, or Memphis, or Jackson or Chattanooga or Gallatin for that matter?  Because it doesn't look like expelling two black, male, Democratic members of the house is going to be an effective deterrent.