(HorizonPost.com) – The gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety recently announced that it is launching a $100K ad campaign to pressure Tennessee lawmakers to support a proposed red flag law during the upcoming special legislative session.
On Tuesday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee unveiled a list of public safety measures he wants the Republican-led legislature to address in the special session that was prompted by the shooting at Covenant Christian school in Nashville earlier this year, ABC News reported.
In his proclamation, Lee includes 18 different issues the governor wants lawmakers to consider, including mental health, school safety policies, and gun storage.
In his statement on Tuesday, Governor Lee said the state “remains vigilant” by “taking continued actions to protect communities while preserving the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.” Lee said that he worked with the General Assembly to develop “practical measures to strengthen public safety.”
The session will also allow lawmakers to debate Lee’s proposal to keep guns away from individuals who are deemed likely to be a threat to others or themselves. Governor Lee has argued that this proposal is not a “red flag” law, which he said is a “toxic political label” designed to “draw lines in the sand.”
But gun control activists like Everytown don’t use “red flag” to describe “red flag” laws. Instead, they describe the measure as “Extreme Risk” laws. Everytown, which was founded in 2014 by Michael Bloomberg, began running ads in Tennessee urging voters to contact state legislators to urge them to support Governor Lee’s “Extreme Risk” proposal.
In its statement on the special legislative session, Everytown claimed that the Covenant Christian School shooting could have been prevented if Tennessee had an “Extreme Risk” law in place.
However, as Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins notes, despite its “Extreme Risk” (AKA “red flag”) law, California ranked as the state with the highest number of active shooter incidents in 2021. Additionally, some of the most high-profile shootings in the country in recent years have occurred in Colorado, despite the state’s “red flag” law, Hawkins writes.
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