Tennessee Republicans Issue Stupidest Possible Statement on Gun Control

On Wednesday, Tennessee House Republicans announced on Twitter that “any red flag law is a non-starter,” and also that they are “focused on finding solutions that prevent dangerous individuals from harming the public.”

What?

Just to spell it out: The point of red flag laws are to prevent individuals with … “red flags” from … “harming the public.”

The nonsensical statement comes in the aftermath of the Nashville school shooting that left three children and three adults dead. Thousands of Tennesseans have been protesting since the incident demanding gun reform. The movement has only gained momentum after Republicans expelled two since-reinstated Black Democrats, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for interrupting House proceedings to stand in solidarity with the protesters. And the tides beneath the clamoring for change has only swelled amid a string of mass and targeted shootings throughout the country.

Republican Governor Bill Lee recently expressed interest in some form of a red flag law, but he did not go into specifics, and apparently he has not worked to convince the rest of his party it’s actually necessary.

Despite the increasing demands by the public for any action to stop the onslaught of gun violence, Tennessee Republicans have largely remained intransigent. Tennessee actually loosened gun laws on the day of the Nashville shooting. Republicans have also repeatedly shut down a red flag law that could have prevented the shooting in the first place: once two years ago, and again just last week.

The disinterest in public safety stems beyond red flag laws. Before the shooting, state Republicans also passed a bill allowing people 21 and older to openly carry handguns without permits. Republicans are now pushing to allow 18- and 19-year-old residents to carry any firearm—including weapons like AR-15s and shotguns—without permits.

As of 2020, Tennessee was among the top 10 deadliest states in the country from guns.

A top Tennessee Republican who voted alongside his party to expel three Democratic representatives for breaking House “decorum” has resigned after the findings of a sexual harassment investigation became public.

NewsChannel5 reported that a secret ethics subcommittee found state Representative Scotty Campbell, vice chair of the House Republican caucus, guilty of sexually harassing at least one legislative intern, and likely two.

The findings were sent nearly three weeks ago to House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who is facing his own ethics issues over reports that he doesn’t actually live in the district he represents. Sexton made no move to expel Campbell, who only resigned after the charges were made public on Thursday.

The ethics investigation into Campbell details the extent of his sexual harassment. In an email the victim wrote to university officials, given to NewsChannel5 by a family member, she recounted some of Campbell’s gross behaviors.

On one occasion, after watching the victim and another 19-year-old female intern enter her apartment, Campbell allegedly later “made comments about how … he was in his apartment imagining that we were performing sexual acts on one another and how it drove him crazy knowing that was happening so close to him.”

The victim told Campbell, uncomfortably, that that was not happening; the Republican representative insisted that he knew it was happening and asked her to tell him all about it. She responded that the other girl was her friend. Campbell allegedly went on to explain how sexually attractive he finds her as well.

NewsChannel5 reports that the other girl is likely the second complainant against Campbell.

Campbell also reportedly made repeated comments about how he is “very, very lonely” and wishes “he had someone with whom he could just cuddle.”

In another instance, Campbell asked the victim how many men she slept with. After she said zero, Campbell insisted she was lying, then asked how many women she had slept with. He “said he bets girls go crazy over me,” the victim wrote in the email. Campbell then apparently offered her cannabis gummies in exchange for being able to see her tattoos and piercings.

“I told him absolutely not, and he begged me for several hugs,” she wrote in her email. She grew more and more fearful; Campbell grew more and more brazen, reaching out and grabbing her neck.

“I recoiled and said I felt sick and immediately left. That was the last night I ever spoke with or saw him. I blocked his number after that.”

Campbell has repeatedly insisted that the conversations he had with the intern were “consensual adult” ones.

Meanwhile, the legislature is slow to release much further information, including how much taxpayer money was spent covering up the disturbing behavior. NewsChannel5 reports that potentially thousands of dollars have been spent to relocate the victim from the apartment building that she and Campbell both lived in, to ship her furniture back home to another part of Tennessee, and to place her in a hotel for the remainder of her internship.

Again: Tennessee taxpayers have had to foot the bill of protecting a victim from sexual harassment—and from potentially facing further harassment—by a sitting Republican lawmaker.

Before Tennessee Republicans sought to expel three Democrats—and succeeded in expelling the two Black ones, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones—for standing in solidarity with thousands of Tennesseans protesting gun violence, they have long been making up and manipulating the rules in order to avoid public accountability. Such behavior has led them to vote down bills with abandon and introduce last-minute amendments to legislation that the public is seldom aware of. And in so doing, Republicans have established arbitrary standards that brought them to so brazenly expel Pearson and Jones, while ignoring when their own colleagues are sexual harassers, child molesters, or allegedly assaulting others on the House floor.

Twitter on Thursday began removing blue verification checkmarks from people who do not pay for the platform’s subscription plan.

People can pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue to receive increased visibility on the platform. Those who don’t are having a field day with jokes now that they have lost their once-coveted blue check.

Some of the major people who have lost blue check status include Donald Trump, Beyonce, and Bill Gates.

Elon Musk still has his because he’s an “affiliate of Twitter.”

Republican Representative Nancy Mace thinks her party is the new wave of feminists because it passed a bill banning transgender women and girls from women’s sports.

The House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that would amend Title IX, a civil rights law that bans sex- or gender-based discrimination, to limit a person’s sex to the one they were assigned at birth. The measure passed entirely along party lines and is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.

At one point during the debate, Mace suggested that Republican support for women’s equality in sports (except for trans women) makes them “the feminists of today.”

“As a woman who is pro-LGBTQ, I don’t care how you dress, I don’t care what pronoun you take, I don’t care if you change your gender, but we ought to protect biological women and girls in their athletics,” she said.

Mace suggested another amendment to conduct a study of the supposed adverse psychological effects on cisgender women and girls of letting trans women play women’s sports.

Democratic Representative Mark Takano clapped back that nothing is “further from the truth.”

“This amendment perpetuates false arguments that allowing transgender girls to participate in school sports teams will undermine the well-being of cisgender girls,” he said.

Democrat Pramila Jayapal pointed out that the only way for schools to enforce this rule would be to conduct genital exams on students.

Mace is rapidly becoming a classic “pick-me girl.” She keeps trying to show she’s not like other Republicans, even denouncing them to stand out from the crowd. Mace has repeatedly urged her party to adopt a more centrist stance on abortion rights. She also said she would oppose kicking Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

But at the end of the day, she voted with Republicans every time.

Florida’s drag ban has not yet been signed into law, and yet it is already stopping Pride celebrations in the state.

The measure passed the state House of Representatives Wednesday by a vote of 82–32 and is now headed to the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis. If he signs it into law, the measure would prohibit government entities and employees from issuing permits to organizations that may hold “adult live performances” in the presence of minors. It would also ban businesses from allowing minors to attend such performances.

The Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast, which covers several counties in southeastern Florida, announced some dramatic changes late Wednesday to its Pride celebrations in light of the legislation.

“As all of you know, the political climate that we are currently in has us all very concerned for our community. After multiple meetings with city officials, it is with a heavy heart that Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast has to announce that this weekend’s Pridefest will now be a 21 and older event,” the group said on Facebook.

“We also regret to announce that we will have to cancel our plans to bring back our beloved parade.”

“This is the law working as intended: forcing queer people back into the closet,” tweeted New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen.

Florida is the latest state to advance a (vaguely worded, extreme) measure attacking drag performances, which have become a particular target for the right wing in recent years. It is likely to become the second state to pass a law, after Tennessee in March. The Tennessee law was blocked by a judge before it could go into effect on the grounds that it was overly broad and violated free speech rights.