The first time Tennessee’s governor stood at the podium in the wake of the mass shooting at the Covenant School last month, he was flanked by his Republican counterparts. They touted school “hardening” measures, including hiring more armed guards and strengthening entry points.
The next time, Gov. Bill Lee stood alone. He called for something rare in a Second Amendment-friendly state like Tennessee: gun-control measures.
On this push, the governor finds himself diverging from his conservative colleagues.
“I’m asking the legislature to bring forth thoughtful, practical measures,” Lee said. “To strengthen our laws, to separate those dangerous people from firearms, while at the same time preserving the constitutional rights of the people of this state.”
Past mass shootings had not moved the needle. But Covenant felt different. The violence struck close to home for Lee — it happened at a private Christian school, and claimed the life of a close family friend of the governor as well as three 9-year-old children.
“I had a tiny, tiny bit of hope,” said Linda McFadyen-Ketchum with the gun control advocacy organization Moms Demand Action Tennessee. “It was a little crack in a wall that’s been getting stronger and harder to breach for ten years.”
But only a small bit of hope.
Right away, there were signs the governor’s idea could struggle to win backers in the Republican supermajority. And in a frustrating turn, the approach the governor has landed on would ultimately expand a gun dispossession system in Tennessee that has a track record of allowing guns to slip through the cracks with deadly consequences.
A red flag law by any other name
Lee kept his proposal vague enough to invite participation from both sides of the aisle. But the general idea would go something like this: someone could report a person as armed and dangerous to themselves or others. There would be a hearing, and if the court ordered it, that person would give up their guns temporarily.
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The process he laid out is similar to a “red flag” law, also known as an extreme risk protection order. But Lee was careful to not use those words, responding to journalists’ questions by saying his proposal would be “unique.”
“I believe what he wants is an extreme risk protection order law for Tennessee or a ‘red flag’ law,” McFadyen-Ketchum said. “And I think he is signaling the supermajority to get on board.”
There’s precedent for such a law to pass in a conservative state, especially with the motivating force of a mass shooting. Florida created a “red flag” law in the wake of the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And since then, judges in Florida have acted thousands of times to separate dangerous people from their guns.
Plus, recent polling has shown the majority of Tennessee voters support a similar measure.
But Lee has reason to believe that the Republican legislature doesn’t have an appetite for that. So instead, he pointed to a different approach, with a different name.
He said he wanted the legislature to expand a system that exists for domestic violence victims, called an order of protection law. Victims of domestic violence and stalking can petition the courts to put legal separation between themselves and their abuser. And the person can indicate if their abuser has a gun. Then, the court can ask for those guns to be surrendered.
Lee’s proposal would expand and strengthen that process to cover other types of relationships, beyond just domestic violence.
But McFadyen-Ketchum says that could result in more people falling victim to the same dangerous loophole that is claiming the lives of domestic violence victims in Tennessee.
The flaws in the system
One of the biggest flaws with Tennessee’s current gun dispossession approach comes immediately after an abuser is ordered to give up their guns.
“Everything falls apart,” McFadyen-Ketchum says. “There’s no follow-through to see if people really did dispossess. Where are the guns? Who did you give them to?”
The state has no enforcement mechanism. Instead, the system trusts that a person who is abusing their partner will keep their word.
“We have an honor system, with people who are not honorable,” McFadyen-Ketchum says.
And while other states require guns to be turned over to law enforcement, Tennessee has a more dangerous option. The state allows for someone to give their guns to a third party, like a friend or a relative. It’s the default in Tennessee, but a rarity in the rest of the country — just 13 states allow it.
Those other states also have a method of following up with that third party. They identify who received the gun, they bring them to court for a hearing, or can even hold them liable if the gun ends up in the wrong hands.
Tennessee hasn’t adopted any of those practices.
The state doesn’t even require the third party to be identified in paperwork.
The toll of a system ‘without teeth’
Tennessee, like most states, keeps no record of how many people are killed by guns that the perpetrator should not have had.
But Nashville’s Office of Family Safety, a division within the city government that works with domestic violence survivors, does keep track.
Their numbers provide a limited glimpse, over just a few years, into the system. In an average year, they found, roughly half of the perpetrators in domestic violence gun homicides were prohibited from having access to a weapon at the time of the shooting.
One of those cases was that of Marie Varsos.
Records show that Marie filed an order of protection against her estranged husband Shaun, and told law enforcement and the courts that he had a gun and threatened to kill her with it.
Shaun was ordered to dispossess, and he said he was giving his guns to his father — utilizing the third party loophole and, it turns out, lying to the courts.
“Ultimately, those same firearms were used to kill my mother and sister,” says Alex Youn, Marie’s brother.
In Marie’s case, because no one followed up, all she had was an order of protection on a piece of paper to protect her from Shaun’s guns.
And Youn believes that order likely just spurred Shaun to act.
“It only infuriates them,” Youn says. “And makes them even more angry and has the ability to set them off when an order of protection actually doesn’t have any teeth.”
Push for reform
Lee is now asking the legislature to expand the state’s order of protection law, and to improve how it functions — a reform push that advocates unsuccessfully lobbied for in the past.
One push came after Travis Reinking walked into a Nashville Waffle House and opened fire in 2018. He killed four people and injured several others.
Reinking came from Illinois, where he was ordered to give up his firearms due to prior offenses. He said he was giving them to his father, yet one of those weapons was used in the shooting.
In the aftermath, Illinois tightened their dispossession processes. The courts held Reinking’s father responsible for letting his son have access to weapons.
“Being able to do what Illinois did and hold that father accountable … and giving the firearm back is a really important safety mechanism if we’re going to allow third party dispossession,” says Becky Bullard of Nashville’s Office of Family Safety.
But when lawmakers and advocates like Bullard introduced a similar reform in Tennessee, it did not pass.
Now advocates are worried the Covenant School shooting may have the same outcome.
Since the governor stood alone at that podium last week, lawmakers have yet to move forward. In fact, Tennessee Republicans are pushing to end this year’s session early.
If they are able to introduce an expanded order of protection bill this session, Bullard says, it could magnify problems that domestic violence victims have faced for years, making them impossible to ignore.
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