by John Harris
Governor Lee appears in his public statements to express no interest at all in protecting the private, mental or emotional health records of Tennesseans particularly when such information is irrelevant as a matter of law to the question of whether an individual can legally purchase or possess a firearm.
A more troubling component of Governor Lee’s public statements had to do with what is clearly a call by him for Tennessee to pass a Red Flag law. He referenced the Covenant School murders as perhaps an event that would facilitate the passage of what he avoided calling a Red Flag law by referencing the substantial bipartisan support for the legislation that passed last week to spend millions of additional dollars to increase the presence of armed officers at public and private schools and to “harden” Tennessee’s school by what some understood as converting them into essentially locked down compounds.
Governor Lee described his desire to rush through an additional law here in the next few weeks to “remove individuals who are a threat to themselves or to our society, to remove them from access to weapons.” He continued by stating that he wants the Legislature “to bring forth … measures to do that, to strengthen our laws to separate those dangerous people from firearms.” Although that is clearly a Red Flag law, he wants to call it a “new stronger order of protection law.”
Nowhere in his press statements did Governor Lee indicate that he wanted to use or improve the laws that now exist which are designed to identify people with emotional or mental health issues, to determine by competent medical proof whether those mental or emotional health issues cause the person to be a material risk of harm to themselves or third persons, and, if so, to remove the person from society by temporarily involuntarily holding them for up to 2 weeks for mental health evaluation and treatment. These laws remove the risk – the person – from the capacity to do harm. These laws focus on the real risk – a severely mentally disturbed individual not on some inanimate object. Tennessee already has these laws.
Instead, Governor Lee’s proposal would be to leave the risk, the person, free in society. It would leave the person free to acquire other weapons, perhaps non-firearms weapons. His proposal does not remove the risk. His proposal operates under the delusion that merely “separating” the person from a particular firearm or making it harder for them to purchase another one would eliminate the risk. That is itself a unfounded delusion.
One may ask why is it that Governor Lee proposes a Red Flag gun control law rather than proposing laws to address the cause of violence or to improve or even expand mental health programs in the state – programs which can and should focus on identifying individuals whose mental or emotional health conditions make them a clear and present risk to themselves or others?
Further, not once does Governor Lee even attempt to comply with the requirements now imposed on governments as required by the United States Supreme Court under its Bruen decision. Not once does he articulate any law that constituted part of the “nation’s historical tradition” of regulating the individual’s fundamental right to keep and bear arms as that right and those restrictions existed in 1791.
The failure to Governor Lee and the Legislative proponents to clearly comply with the mandates of Bruen should raise concerns for all Tennesseans that these government officials are willing to use the perceived power and authority of their government offices to engage in acts of official oppression by ignoring unequivocal constitutional limits on the scope of discretion, if any, that they have on the issues related to the scope of the Second Amendment’s protections.
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John Harris is the executive director of the Tennessee Firearms Association.
Background Photo “Guns” by Joe Loong. CC BY-SA 2.0.
