How to Break Public Schools: A Republican Playbook

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.