The Future of Gun Control

The title of this live stream is The Future of Gun Control. And the reason for that is that what's happening right now in Tennessee is kind of, I believe, a preview of what we're going to see across the country. All right, welcome back to another T-Rex talk. It's been a very long time since we've done any live streams on the T-Rex YouTube channel. And I will be honest, we didn't plan this one super far in advance. But there's a bunch of stuff that is happening in Tennessee right now that has to do with firearm law. We have a special session, I'm going to explain what that means. The difference between a regular legislative session and a special session and going to talk about what some of the laws are that are being discussed. But this is a very important issue, I think for everybody, not just people in Tennessee. And I'll talk about the reason for that. The title of this live stream is The Future of Gun Control. And the reason for that is that what's happening right now in Tennessee is kind of, I believe, a preview of what we're going to see across the country. So we'll get into that. We're calling this a T-Rex talk. We used to do live streams in the past. If you're watching right now, you're probably one of the T-Rex core fan base that remembers the good old live stream days. We still do T-Rex talks as podcasts. There's something like a hundred and eighty episodes that are up now. And we'll post the audio for this as podcast in podcast form. So I think that that will be helpful for folks. And we're going to do live streams for the next couple of days as long as there's interesting news coming out of Tennessee, out of Nashville, out of this special session where all the legislators are discussing gun laws. I'm not going to tell you exactly how many because we don't know exactly how long that they're going to run. We're hearing that they will be done on Thursday. But there's been a lot of change recently and what they're actually doing on the hill. And it's hard to know what all the reports are actually how much credence to give to all of them. So we will be back tomorrow. We may be back the day after that. And we will keep you posted on what's going on. Now let me talk a little bit about why we think this is important. Why this is important for people outside of Tennessee. As you probably know, you have heard about the Bruin decision that was handed down by the Supreme Court over a year ago. And the Bruin decision gave new precedent on how we talk about second amendment law, how we talk about gun control law in the United States. A couple of tests that we use in this country now, this should be across all judicial jurisdictions, all court decisions should be using these two tests to determine if a gun control law is unconstitutional or not. Whether it violates the second amendment that says, shall not be infringed. If shall not be infringed, it was not clear enough. We now have a couple of relatively clear tests from the Supreme Court in that Bruin decision. And since that Bruin decision, I was talking to a gun control lawyer at the second amendment foundation. I should say anti gun control lawyer, a gun rights lawyer at the second amendment foundation. And he said that we had more wins for gun rights in the 10 months after the Bruin decision than the 10 years before. So that decision has had a massive implication on firearm freedoms in the United States of America and a whole bunch of the regular tactics that have been used by every town and various other gun control groups. They don't really work anymore. They've already been struck down in a couple of different courts or multiple jurisdictions. And so I believe that red flag laws are going to be one of the major new end runs around Bruin. This is the idea. Now we have a bunch of red flag laws already, but most of them were passed in the year 2018 after the Florida school shooting down in Parkland. And what is really going to be interesting to see is if any of those red flag laws get challenged in court, but as of now none of them have. And so the push is to pass more red flag laws in various states and use mental health and preemptive disarmament of specific people as the way to do gun confiscations as opposed to some of the gun control things that used to be possible in the past before Bruin. So here's what happened in Tennessee. Earlier this year there was a school shooting in Nashville. This was the covenant shooting. You probably saw it quite a bit in the news. There were six people who were killed three adults and three children. It was a really tragic shooting and the shooter was a young woman and was undergoing some form of therapy and was using male pronouns and just a very interesting situation that we haven't learned very much more about. The shooter left a manifesto, but that manifesto has been kept locked up. So that's not really part of the conversation at this point. Even though mental health is a very large part of the conversation and the motivations of shooters is a very important part of this conversation that we are theoretically having. And what happened was that shooting took place on, I believe March 28th if that is correct, and we were still in session at that time. The Tennessee legislature meets some time in January and it goes through a couple three, four months depending on how much business they actually have to do. This is the way that most state legislators work. It's part time gig. You are in session four, three, or four months depending on all kinds of different factors. The shooting happened while the legislature was still meeting. There was immediately a huge amount of pressure for them to pass red flag laws, something that would disarm people before they could ever be any kind of threat. And there were protesters that came in from all over the place and I mean all over the place, mostly New York, though. Most of the license plates that we saw parked around Nashville seemed to be New York plates, which is not normal. That was a special event. There were lots of school children that were brought in as some of them were field trips, some of them were organized walkouts, but teacher organized walkouts, not always children organized walkouts because the children can't actually commandeer the school buses and organize an entire class to come down to the legislature. So there were a lot of people from outside and some of these school field trips were coming from Kentucky and from Alabama and a huge amount of phone calls. Originally, most of the phone calls were coming from New York area codes until they got the phone bank set up. Speaking of phone banks, there's a whole bunch of political pressure on Tennessean's right now and somebody just posted a fascinating picture of one of the phone banks that is being run out of Colorado. So, well, if you could bring that picture up and we'll just show that on the screen for you. I don't understand how exactly these phone banks are helping Tennessean's. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that Tennesseans are calling folks in Colorado. These very helpful every town and mom's demand action volunteers. Oh, wait, are they volunteers? Not all of them are volunteers, but let's just assume they're just helping regular Tennesseans contact their senators and their legislators. Now, there are allegations, of course, that this is not what is happening, that these are people all around the country from out of town that do not live in Tennessee and they're being paid to make these phone calls directly to the senators and the representatives here in Tennessee to pressure them to do stuff. So, that is called astroturfing when people pretend like this is organic grassroots activity from people who are directly related to the issue and care passionately about the issue. One, in fact, they're being paid by someone. It's usually Michael Bloomberg. Sometimes it's George Soros. Occasionally, it's other people and they set up call centers like this and they use for me emails and things like that. So, that is a kind of an interesting thing that has been happening. But that happened a lot in March. There was a huge amount of pressure. There was a huge amount of disruption. There were an awful lot of protesters around the Capitol building who came into the Capitol building. And yet, despite all of that, the legislature decided not to pass red flag laws. They finished out the session without taking on any of that legislation and they finished and they went home. So, the legislature made the decision that they did not see this as something urgent that they had to do in a short amount of time and they left. However, the governor of a state, and I think this is true of all 50 states. All 50 states have divisions of power where you have the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch just like the federal government. The executive is the one who is allowed to call a special session in times of emergency whenever the legislature needs to come and deal with something that is a legitimate emergency. Actually, really like this division of powers where the legislatures cannot just decide when they want to make laws and call themselves back to give themselves raises or whatever. A different branch will call them back for an emergency. They don't have the power to do that themselves. However, they've already decided back in April that they weren't going to pass red flag laws because it wasn't an emergency. So, the fact that the governor is calling them back. Now, in August, to deal with the emergency of gun violence and public safety and mental health and there are a couple of other things in his proclamation that he mentioned. He's calling them back to deal with an emergency that they already discussed and decided not to address. That is more of a concerning issue and the timing is also kind of an interesting issue. Originally, it was going to be in the summertime, but it waited until now to win. School is back in session and so forth. So, just kind of an interesting set of timings involved in the whole thing. And we are now one day into special session. They convened last night at about four o'clock, and the first thing that they did was set some new rules. Should we go into some of the stuff that happened, some of the disruptions that happened last time? So, this is very interesting, and it got a lot of national press. And because it got a lot of national press, there's a lot of people looking for national press attention right now. Don't really blame the national press for getting involved. There were lots of national players like Michael Bloomberg and other people getting involved, so why not get everybody involved? We had a few particular, should we talk about who they are, the Justin's. They're called the Tennessee 3. If you want to know more about the Tennessee 3, you can look them up. And certain publications will say that there are some of the most heroic heroes that America has ever had. And other people will point out that they caused a lot of disruption and brought bull horns into the Tennessee legislature down to the well, started yelling at people using bull horns. Stuff that is, you know, I would say it's not heroic, even though some people say that is free speech. So, the Tennessee 3 were pretty loud and obnoxious, and they brought protesters in, and they did stuff on the floor, which you're not supposed to do. And so, when the special session convened, the first thing they did was put some new rules into play, specifically for the special session, on who was allowed to talk and people in the gallery not being allowed to boo and stuff like that. So, that was kind of interesting. And what immediately happened was three people, I'm not going to say who, but three people in particular started to say, hey, we don't need rules. We don't need rules if the quiet. Why would we need rules to do what is right and to have a pleasant conversation here? And I just thought it was interesting that those were just three specific people. So, the conversation about the conversation about the rules was rather interesting because it demonstrated a pretty clear divide. Obviously, this issue of gun control is a pretty partisan issue. And we've talked about, actually almost everybody has talked about, some people have talked endlessly about the political divide and division inside of this country. But one of the ways that you can see that division is in Tennessee politics, and even sometimes at the federal level, you will see politicians talking to each other, theoretically. But they're actually talking past each other. And it isn't just that they're on different wavelengths where they're talking about different issues. Sometimes it is because they are literally not talking to each other at all. They are talking to the cameras. And there were a bunch of people last night on the floor who were not actually talking to the chair. They were not actually talking to their colleagues. They were trying out. And some of them actually, hey, I don't think they're actually this repetitive. I think they're better communicators than this. I think that they said the same thing multiple times because they were giving themselves multiple takes of soundbites that they're going to use in their upcoming re-election campaigns. Or their campaigns for future bigger, more national political positions. So, do we have any clips that would be good to play at this point? That would be an example of this. I want to welcome to the people's house, the spirit of progress, whose presence reminds us that the only constant is change. The breath of change held in the lungs of those singing their resistance, streaming their frustration, speaking their truth to power, whispering their promise to those they love. The breath passed from parent to child as they set off to school. The breath passed between congregants and houses of worship. May they breathe life into this special session. I want to welcome the people to the people's house. Those who have been ignored for too long whose voices have fallen on hardened hearts and ears to busy listening to the promise of campaign contributions to remember those who they were swore, who they swore to serve. May they finally be heard this session. I want to welcome the memory of Evelyn, Mike, William, Catherine, Cynthia, Haley. May we remember their names and those they leave behind. I welcome them here. Many of their loved ones and memory carriers. So, he kind of goes on. Now, what's interesting about that is that's not even part of the debate. That's in the welcoming and honoring part, which is interesting that they still do this during a special session. Again, special session is for emergencies when you want to move fast because there's something that is super, super urgent and usually you come together to do one issue and one issue only, which will get back to you. But they still do the welcoming and honoring thing. And so, most of the guys that spoke before and after that particular Justin were mentioning good friends of the legislators who had passed away or babies who were born to their friends and they wanted to welcome guests who had showed up or they wanted to honor people from their communities. So, welcoming the spirit of progress that is going to sweep away all the gun lobby regardless of what rules anybody passed is not really what welcoming and honoring is for. Even though technically, technically, he did welcome the spirit of progress and that kind of counts. That kind of counts. So, that's just one example. But there was just a lot of debate that went back and forth that was fake debate. So, one of the rules was you're not supposed to bring signs in because there were a lot of very large signs. I don't know if anybody was hit with a sign on camera in March and in April. But there were definitely a lot of people who were kind of disrupted with their signs. So, one of the rules is no signs inside the Capitol building and people complained about that. And one of the points that kept coming up over and over was why can't we bring signs into the Capitol building when you guys can bring guns into the legislative offices. So, right there already you have this bipartisan, you know, very non-bipartisan thing which is our people are the ones with the signs, your people are the ones with the guns. And remember, these are legislators who have been in office for at least a little while. I know that both Justin's have been to the Capitol Hall building and I think the previous legislative office is many, many times. So, they know the rules. They know that guns are allowed inside of Capitol Hall. They weren't having a actual honest conversation about the rules. They were, again, saying these things for their base, for their tweets, for their social media accounts, for their future campaigns. It just makes it very hard to have a honest conversation about these things when people keep asking questions specifically so that they can get a Twitter zinger or some kind of false edited gotcha out of it as opposed to solve the issues. Which is theoretically what we're trying to do with a special session. A special session is when a genuine emergency pops up when the legislature is not sitting and a genuine lay can't wait. If Tennessee were to go to war with somebody that would be a really good example of why the legislature should quickly get together and do what the legislative body is required to do or only the legislative body is allowed to do. Occasionally budget stuff comes up, occasionally disasters happen. But interestingly, this particular governor, Governor Bill Lee, has called, is this his sixth special session? This is his sixth special session in not very many years as governor. And some of those I wouldn't actually throw a red flag on the field for. Like, the COVID lockdowns were silly, but when he actually called the special session to deal with it, it was kind of a big deal. There was a lot of stuff happening at the federal level. It didn't make sense for Tennessee to get together and figure out what they were going to do. But a lot of the special sessions are non-emergency things. And people use the special session as an excuse to suspend the normal rules and get rid of a lot of the due process that you actually have inside of your normal legislative session. So some people call it flow motion, other people call it, other things. If you really want to know the nitty-gritty details of how the special session works and why it's different from regular session, I have an expert right over here. And she is willing to come on and talk about it. And we can do that tomorrow. Or we can do that now if you guys pest her me enough. I am kind of watching the chat out of the corner of my eye. So a lot of people, when the special session is called, see an opportunity to do a little bit of political grandstanding and record some Twitter zingers that they didn't have a chance to earlier. But a lot of people also see an opportunity to push some bills. So even though this particular special session is theoretically only on gun violence, public safety, mental health, theoretically it is pretty narrowly focused. Even though those are not necessarily very narrow focuses. You can drag anything under the umbrella of public safety. And you can drag anything under the umbrella of mental health if you define it widely enough. And people are defining it widely enough. But instead of just focusing on the 18 things that the governor asked for in his proclamation, people have filed over 100 bills in the house and 100 bills in the Senate. So the idea that you're going to get together for a special session, you're going to address an issue that is large and complicated like mental health in a short amount of time. And that you're going to be able to discuss 100 bills while you do so is pretty ludicrous. And I will point out that the special session is not, it's not exactly cheap. I think that it is over $58,000 a day for the per diems and the mileage of the members who are there. Now the good news is this actually comes out of the executive budget. This is another example of where the separated powers thing I think is actually working. If the governor calls the legislature to do something that he wants them to do or to at least discuss something that he wants them to do, it is on his dime. I mean, it's on his department's dime. It is part of his branch. So that is, I think, so it is really wise and very well set up. So everybody that has been called together has different levels of desire to be there. I know a lot of representatives have other plans. They really wanted to be doing something else at this time. They did not calendar this. And then the governor, since his department is in fact footing the bill, doesn't want them there for a particularly long time either. He has a specific list of things that he wants done and he wants them to do them quickly. But there are people there who have nothing better to do. They are planning their campaigns for later. Some of them have already announced that they're running for bigger national seats. I'm not going to say who, but it's some of the Tennessee three. They've already announced they're going to run against Republicans at the national level. So they're fundraising now. And a bunch of other people are showing up to fundraise on this issue too. Gavin Newsom will be in town on Thursday. He will be speaking at, is it the Democratic, the entire Democratic party, dinner, the whole state convention dinner, and he's going to be fundraising. Now interestingly enough, I don't think Gavin Newsom is actually coming down here to try to get Tennesseans to pass red flag laws. I think that he is coming down here to fundraise for himself and his future political endeavors. We're not sure what they are, but they're national. I think he's finished with California. There's not much else he can do at this point. There's not much left. So yeah. But he will be here on Thursday and he will be fundraising on, I don't even know what to call it. It's a second amendment issue, but his goal is amending the second amendment so that it doesn't offer the same types of freedoms that it does now. That is his national speaking tour that he is right now. It is a fundraising tour and that one is actually doomed to failure. He's not going to be able to remove the second amendment based on this particular whistle stop tour, but what he is going to be able to do at the end of it after the Republicans stubbornly and pig-headedly refused to repeal the second amendment. He is going to be able to complain and whinge about Republicans and point out that he is the only guy with a backbone to propose big solutions and then he will be able to run for president. I think we have a presidential election coming up. So the timing is working out really well for him. He probably didn't think about it ahead of time. It just serendipitously is happening. So there's all this stuff going on around this special session. We have an emergency that the legislature already decided was not an emergency back in April. Call back to address it. We have this fairly large scope of public safety and mental health and gun violence stuff that people are jumping on this bandwagon. We have Tennesseans who don't really want the legislature to rapidly, hastily pass a whole bunch of bills on these very sensitive issues. You have obviously very conservative Tennesseans who want no new gun control period and you have a few people mostly in Nashville and Memphis who want more gun control no matter what quickly. But there's a lot of folks in the middle who are they don't have the time to read these hundred new bills that were filed in the last two days and they know that the legislature isn't going to have time to think through all the ramifications of changing the way that we do mental health stuff which by the way nobody really understands even at the legislative level. The amount of time and due diligence that you should spend on some of these issues that have to do with people's due process and their rights to privacy and all the other things that attach to public safety and mental health not just the gun control stuff. Everything else is pretty huge and so the idea that we're just going to ramrod this stuff through in a week is pretty preposterous. Now the good news is that a lot of folks in Nashville actually agree with me. A lot of the folks in the session actually agree with us that a week is not a good time to pass 100 bills that we haven't had time to read that touch upon deeply, deeply fundamental human rights that are the very core of Tennessee's Constitution and the United States Constitution. We should do this very slowly and carefully and get the information and think about all of the unintended consequences that might come along from some of these things. The good news is it looks like the special session in Tennessee is being toned down a little bit from what we expected and a lot of that is thanks to you guys. A bunch of you watching the stream probably sent emails to Tennessee legislators. We have a huge number of people on our Tennessee political newsletter list and on our nationwide political newsletter list and we have been giving you guys updates on what is going on and we have been asking you guys to comment on some of these things not because we haven't been asking you to pretend like you're from Tennessee but to say that these issues have national implications and we have concerns about them and a whole bunch of you people have written it. So we talk about how many emails we may have moved. So we think that we have asked you guys to send emails and we think that you guys have sent about 10,000 emails to the legislature of Tennessee. Most of those are from Tennesseans and if you are from folks outside of Tennessee. I think that that has had an effect. I think that stuff that you have enabled us to do here in Tennessee has helped a lot and there's a ton of other groups that have done things as well. John Harris and Richard Archie over at Tennessee Fire and Association have done a lot and there are some new pro gun groups. Gun arms of America has done quite a bit but in some ways they did less than they expected because nobody anticipated that Tennessee would be kind of a front line on this particular issue. We were watching Oregon and Washington and Illinois do crazy anti-2A stuff and a lot of the national groups started allocating their resources there, getting their lawyers to file lawsuits there. And I think that was totally the right call. That's exactly what I would have recommended that they do. And then this thing happened in a red state with a Republican super majority just kind of out of the blue. So a lot of folks were caught a little bit off guard, we were caught off guard. A bunch of folks that had allocated resources elsewhere were caught off guard. But who else has done a lot? There's some new groups and I should look. The DC project came in. They did a press conference. Do you F2A? There's a whole bunch of new folks who are doing stuff. I'm not sure we should gather more lists of people who have been really, really helpful. We've also seen tremendous efforts to stall, stall is kind of the wrong word, but to put the brakes on to things that shouldn't be ramrotted through here in Tennessee. And last night, I want to call out specifically Brian Richie. And well, do you have the list of, I'll grab the list of the people who voted for this. So Brian Richie actually made a recommendation or a motion joint resolution. I forget exactly how this has to be done because the procedure is kind of important. Even though they set aside all the normal rules for the special session so that they can do things quickly, there's still a lot of procedure involved. But what happened was Brian Richie made the motion that they would just gavill out of the special session entirely because there's too many bills and it isn't actually something that needs to be done and it isn't actually something that's going to be helpful. And six people voted yes and 84 people voted no. So I want to specifically call out those six people and let you know that we are very happy with what they did and we're very impressed with their courage because the consequences of going against the governor and Republican leadership can be severe. It could be very hard for these folks to get their bills through. These people could lose their committee assignments. Oh, one of them lost a chairmanship today. That is swift, um, revenge, justice. What are we calling us? Retribution. That is the better word. It does take a lot of courage and fortitude to do this because the way that Tennessee politics works, and this is true of probably most states, not only is being a local legislator, a part-time geek, but it also is not a gigantic salary and it isn't something that has a significant future career path going forwards. Some people use it as a springboard to go national, like the Tennessee three you're trying to do. Some people get jobs inside of the state some other way, but probably only if you play nicely with Republican leadership or, you know, if you want to take the Democratic route, if you play nicely with the rest of the Democratic caucus. So for guys to stand up, this was Brian Richie. I also want to point out Lynn Kaplie. I'm a huge fan of Kaplie, by the way. He's another one of our freshmen, Kaisling, Hart, Todd Warner, and Hill. So these are the guys who stood up and voted to defy the governor and shut down the special session early because it wasn't necessary. So that took a lot of guts. We're already seeing the retribution go into effect, and we should keep an eye out for what happens to these guys when they reconvene for normal session in January. I kind of lost my train of thought there as I was thinking about the way that the political games are played. It is frustrating to me that we still have this level of politics inside of politics, but I guess it shouldn't be too surprising. And I'm not the only one who is frustrated and annoyed. There are a huge amount of Democrats who are incredibly frustrated and annoyed that they were convinced that they were going to get gun confiscations in Tennessee. They were going to get red flag laws. All this stuff was going to happen in the special session. All the Republicans were going to be stymied and they were going to get everything that they asked for. The protestors would come out of the woodwork and just annoy the Republicans, and it would be a wonderful day, but like all compromises, what is happening in this special session is leaving almost everybody annoyed and unhappy. The left is really annoyed and unhappy that they aren't getting the red flag laws that the governor was pushing for in the earlier part of the summer. But they're also very annoyed that the Republicans are punishing their own quite hard enough. And the hardcore Republicans and conservatives are significantly annoyed that we're even doing some of this in the first place. But I think that what you non-Teniseans are looking at here is kind of, as I said before, the future playbook of gun rights activism and anti-gun activism. Right here, you're seeing a debate around mental health and gun violence and kind of a generic way, and red flags very specifically as the solution to these things. Now, I think that the Republicans, thanks to pressure from Tenniseans, pressure from conservative Tenniseans, pressure from conservative legislators in Tennessee, even though some of them are going to be the victims of retribution, they have nevertheless taken stands and drawn lines in the sand that leadership has to respect. Now that the public and now that media are talking about those particular stands, those are the standards. People are going to take a stand against bills that they say that they support. I think that Randy McNally is a good example of this. He says that he personally still supports red flag laws, but the votes aren't there, so he's not going to push it. Thanks to the brave efforts of some of these people, proper red flag laws are basically dead at this point. Now, the governor still wants temporary mental health orders of restraint or orders of protection or restraining orders. It's kind of hard to keep all of these things straight. Everybody kind of renames their emergency restraining orders or their emergency protective orders or their emergency protective restraining orders so that they can say we don't have a red flag law. We have a slightly different jumble of the exact same words that does exactly the same thing. Even though the governor is still asking for it, I think that that is not going to come out of the special session, but that doesn't mean that it isn't going to keep coming up. It will absolutely be reintroduced into Tennessee in January, but more importantly, it's going to be introduced to you guys in your own states. If you live in a state that does not have a red flag law, currently, you are going to have a red flag law proposed to you and the bipartisan gun safety act that was passed nationally last year under the Biden administration actually offers millions of dollars, 750 million dollars was set aside to give to states that pass red flag laws. So your state is being bribed by the federal government to pass red flag laws and then George Soros and Michael Bloomberg and Gavin Newsome and other people are going to put money into passing red flag laws wherever you live. So pay attention to what's happening in Tennessee because you get to see the playbook of one side and you are going to see strategies that come out of the special session that either work at stopping these things or they won't work at stopping these things and that just kind of remains to be seen. So one of the things that happened today was or maybe it was late last night. We're not entirely sure when this happened. We think that most of it happened late last night. Some people on the Senate side actually went to certain people and said we're not going to deal with this 100 bill nonsense. We're only going to talk about these specific three bills that the governor wants or possibly four. The it's a little bit confusing how stuff actually breaks down and Senate bills have to be matched to house bills. But the Senate is only going to talk about three or maybe four bills. That is pretty set in stone at this point as much as anything can be with the backroom deals that are going on at the moment. Now the house interestingly enough is still talking about a bunch of the bills which is sort of like a game of chicken because technically the house cannot pass anything that the Senate is not also going to pass but they think that maybe the Senate will budge and bring some of these bills back up and we'll talk about that tomorrow based on what happens tonight or what happens tomorrow. There's a lot going on but if stuff happens tomorrow morning we will tell you about it in tomorrow's live stream which will be at five o'clock central just like this one. Right now we have a pretty small scope of bills that is being discussed and as long as the Senate sticks to only those bills that's all that is going to pass. The only thing that leaves this somewhat up in the air is the amendments that will get attached to those bills moving forwards because anyone can suggest an amendment to the bill that changes what the bill does within limits to what the bill actually you know what sections of code it opens up. Now while when you have a special session normally in Tennessee you have a piece of legislation it can only open up one section of code it can only change Tennessee code in one particular section at a time. Is that one of the rules that they set aside for special sessions? So that they can have omnibus bills that open up criminal code here and criminal code there and all sorts of different changes to all sorts of different pieces of the two million lines of code that we have now. Technically it's in the Constitution. Yeah okay so technically the Tennessee Constitution says they can't do this. Yes. So the question is would they get away with it if they did it? Who would hold them accountable? What would the mechanism be to stop people from creating omnibus bills in Tennessee when it is literally unconstitutional to do so? Because I mean this happens a lot. It's very easy to not know all the rules especially when Tennessee code is two million lines of code already. Do a thing and then have the lawyers point out later that you weren't allowed to do it and then rather than go back and change it you changed the rule that said that you weren't allowed to do it in the first place. That does happen occasionally. Now change the Constitution is a big deal but I can easily see some people saying hey if nobody calls the foul then there was no foul and then see whether or not the foul gets called. Kind of in the same way that the House is talking about a bunch of bills that the Senate has said that they won't talk about because maybe we'll be able to get them to talk about them after all. Maybe the Senate will pass more than three bills. Let's go through some of these bills and let's look at some of these because not only are these bills probably coming back up in regular session in Tennessee. The ideas behind these bills are probably coming up in other states. So what orders should we do these in? This gets very confusing when you have 100 bills and technically you end up with 100 bills on the House side and 100 bills on the Senate side. They will amend in each house, see each in each half they will amend bills and change them and then if they pass them in a way where they're not lined up they then have to get together and line them back up. So it is a very important separation of powers and the inefficiencies that come about are a feature not a bug. A lot of the stuff that our legislators talk about are things that should happen extremely slowly and different groups should be peer reviewing different bills extremely slowly and carefully and methodically and then checking their notes afterwards. So all of these extra steps are good because we want not very many laws and we want new laws to happen not very fast. So the fact that we have two million lines of code now means that we should be cleaning stuff out as opposed to adding new stuff. So let's talk about House Bill 701, 700, 7001. This is a firearms and ammunition bill and it classifies that any classes that train for handgun carry permits are enhanced handgun carry permits here in Tennessee must include training on the use of gun locks. So this is exactly the kind of bill that is extremely frustrating to me because people in the middle will say this bill doesn't do very much so what's the harm? And I am saying this bill doesn't do very much so why would you add a whole bunch of new lines of code about how you are trained to use gun locks when we already should be getting rid of as much of our carry permits as possible and go straight constitutional carry. Every bit of code that we add to our existing handgun carry process makes constitutional carry a little bit harder to get to. If that is actually the goal, which a lot of these Republican legislators have said that it is, then all of these speed bumps are going to get in the way. There's also bills that have to do with giving free gun locks to folks and that's going to come out of a budget somewhere. It's going to come out of a state budget or we're going to ask for more federal money to do it and when the state asks for federal money to do stuff it always comes with federal strings. So and also if you're watching the T-Rex arms live stream right now you already know that when you buy a gun it comes with a pointless and useless gun lock. We already have federal laws that say that you cannot sell a gun without there being a gun lock in the box. So every gun in Tennessee that has been sold and the last I forget how long that's been 28 years, 36 years. Most of the guns in Tennessee already came with a lock. All the owner has to do is remember where they put the useless lock that they never used and then they will have the lock. Giving away more gun, more or more gun locks isn't going to actually solve anything. So there are some safe storage bills in here that kind of address this fact that no one is going to use gun locks. I kind of want to skip to some of the bad bills to talk about because there is a fascinating safe storage bill that uses a mechanism that I've never seen before which is you will sign an affidavit which is a very fast anyway. I think that it would actually be difficult in the state of Tennessee to pass a safe storage bill with real teeth to it. Believe it or not, I think that even some of the middle of the road Tennesseans are so comfortable with guns and they're so used to hunting and they're so comfortable with the idea of guns being around that that even the safe storage laws that they think they're a good idea but punishing people for having a gun in a truck or something like that just doesn't sit right with them because they're crusty old Tennesseans and they're used to that sort of thing. It's very normal to drive around Tennessean and pick out truck with a rifle in the back. It's just extremely normal. But I'm looking for this particular bill that talks about the affidavit. And here's the way that that works. If you tried to pass a bill in Tennessee that says you go to prison if you didn't lock your gun up. If you didn't lock your gun up, you get locked up. That is the sort of thing that I don't think would fly. But this is a very sneaky bill because what it says is that you must, if you own a firearm, you must sign an affidavit and file it with the government saying that you will lock it up. And then if the gun is ever stolen and it's proved that you didn't lock it up, you don't get punished for not locking your gun up. You get punished for swearing a false affidavit, basically perjury. And I don't actually know what the penalties for that are in Tennessee because it's tied up in a whole bunch of sections of code that linked to other sections of code. But I do remember that in Texas it was up to 10 years. The punishment for false affidavit would be up to 10 years in prison in Texas. So that is pretty sneaky. I actually have to say, whoever came up with that idea, I got to give you a little bit of a hat tip because that is pretty ingenious. It's diabolical, but it's kind of ingenious. So a lot of the ideas that are coming out in some of these particular bills here that were filed, even though they're not going to be heard in special session. And even though they probably won't even fly in January when everybody reconvenes for general session, for proper session, these are bills that you're going to see popping up in other states. These are bills that are probably coming to a state legislature near you. Let me look at the Q&A for a little bit. People are talking about gun locks and what is the fine for stealing again. Well, see, see, this is part of the issue that that we don't really talk about. It's already a crime to steal a gun. It's already a crime to murder people with a gun. It's already a crime to rob people with a gun. We already have a whole bunch of crimes on the books for people who commit crimes with guns. Gun crime is already pretty criminal. So it's just a matter of actually bringing some of those laws to bear against the criminals. But because we aren't addressing crime well enough, we aren't actually prosecuting criminals, we aren't actually enforcing some of the laws that we have, the assumption is that we just have to catch more criminals. It's easier to make law abiding people criminals and catch them because they don't fight back as much and they don't run away as well. So that's just, you know, that's my rather cynical theory. It's definitely true for a lot of gun issues. If you look at the ATF, I mean, push yourself in an ATF agent's shoes for just a moment. If you honestly want to get guns off the streets, where would you like to start? Cartel members who behead people for fun or guys who have a few shotguns in their safe and have never harmed anybody. Whose house would you rather roll up to? This is I think a lot of ATF motivation right there. I think I also like killing dogs. That's the other thing. Gun safety saves kids and prevents government innovation. So this is an excellent point. Part of the reason that I am opposed to some of the safe storage stuff is not that I'm opposed to keeping guns in safe places. You should absolutely keep your guns in safe places so that people don't take them. Whether those people are criminals or whether those people are children who don't haven't been taught gun safety because they're relatives of yours and you haven't had an opportunity to teach them gun safety yet or whether they're, you know, a random ATF agents or whatever. Guns should be secured either by having them on your person or having them in safe places. I'm not arguing for guns to be just left around willy-nilly. I'm arguing for guns to be accessible to the people who should have them. But here's where we get down to the issue of the legislation. Is it the government's job to make sure that your guns are safe and you can be responsible for them or is it your job to make sure that you can be responsible for your guns? A lot of the things that are being proposed in these particular pieces of legislation are not things that are bad. They are things that it is bad for the government to do. It is bad for the government to come into your house to look around and see if there's anything that they don't like that's not in a safe. That's your job. It is your job to be responsible for the stuff that you have in your house and the people that come into your house and where bullets that come out of your gun go, that is your responsibility. And handing that responsibility off to other people is what causes a lot of this problem. Same thing with children and school shootings. There's going to be a huge amount of conversation about child safety. And we're overlooking the fact that we're sending our children off to government buildings. Government agents are running those schools whether they are state schools or federal or county. There's a whole bunch of different interplay between federal education people and state education people and local esteroes. Government people are supposed to be protecting those children inside of those schools. That's your responsibility that we've handed off to government people. And then when something goes terribly, terribly wrong, the government people are very rarely held accountable. The law-abiding people who have guns safely stored in safes who aren't going to shoot back at agents when they show up to have their guns confiscated. Those are the people who usually have bills pointed at them. So that is the very frustrating thing that happens. Whenever there is this kind of tragedy, the solutions that are being suggested don't address any of the core issues. Don't really address any of the fundamental issues. They address the symptoms on top of the symptoms. And this is something that works really, really well. Because when you see something like the covenant shooting, it is so incredibly tragic and it is so incredibly difficult to think through the pain and the suffering of these families who are involved or they're close friends like the governor and his wife. The governor and his wife are close friends of people who were killed in that shooting. They are emotionally very caught up in this thing and they desperately want for there to be an easy solution so that this never happens again to anyone. And I think that they're behaving very selflessly in their desire to solve gun violence. But they're going to do it in ways that take power away from the people whose responsibility it really was and give it to government agencies who have already proven themselves to be unable to protect people. It really isn't going to address the core issues. It's only going to be a band-aid on top of band-aid on top of a band-aid. And because it is such a painful and difficult issue, and because we would rather put another band-aid on, then do the very painful thing of ripping a bunch of band-aids off, that's just going to be very appealing to a lot of people, unfortunately. Do we have anything else new all that we should really try to cover in our last few minutes? Is there anything new that has happened since we've been talking? Because this is a special session, stuff that's happening all the time, there are people having meetings about the legislation as we speak. Are they live on the floor at the moment? That goes post-posed. Okay, so this is another thing that happens quite a bit. Because it is a special session, because it is an emergency, because people are trying to move very quickly, the schedule changes very fast. People were scheduled to be talking on the floor about bills that had made it out of committee this evening. That was the original plan back a couple of days ago. But, you know, no plan ever really survives first contact with protesters and principal legislators. And so, now they're going to continue to talk about things in committee tomorrow, and they will be on the floor tomorrow night. So, tomorrow night, we will be back here doing the live stream. We will have more data for you. We will have more clips. We had more clips tonight, but we're not. This is a pretty last-minute thing, and you can tell that it's a little bit laid back. We want to talk to some legislators, and we want to show you guys what is happening live on the floor and comment on it. And we'll try to do a little bit better job of taking questions. It's been a while since I've done this, and I've kind of lost my multi-tasking capabilities here. So, I'm not doing a tremendous job of keeping up with your questions. And you guys have put a lot of stuff in the chat. I appreciate all of you who are watching and spending so much time on this boring issue. And I know that most of you are outside of Tennessee, and probably, you know, would rather not care about Tennessee legislation and really boring meetings that are happening in back rooms right now. But this is an issue that is going to affect you in other states. And a lot of the playbook that's being run right now, the emotional calls back to family members who have lost children. Those are incredibly powerful. That's going to be something that continually comes up. And I don't even describe any ulterior motives to that. It is hard not to talk about these incredibly horrific things that have happened. There was a Department of Health, yeah, Department of Health issued a report that said that firearms are the number one cause of death in children in Tennessee. And it's kind of like the national statistic that is being run out there. Firearms kill more people than car accidents that are children. But you can only get those numbers if you really change the window so that you don't include any children under the age of one, but you do include children that are 17 and 18, but not 19, but not 20. You have to fudge the numbers and you have to change a few things to make those statistics actually say that thing. But at the same time, those are children that were killed by firearms. It is incredibly tragic and it's hard not to talk about this. It's hard not to see an event like that happen. And especially if you are a parent to not have this weighing on your mind. There are millions of children inside of Tennessee and they're far more likely to be killed by cars or diseases than firearms. But the events that happened in March were so incredibly horrific and tragic and far more preventable than other types of accidents that people want to talk about these things. It is impossible for it not to be on your mind and to be a weight on you. And there are people who have ulterior motives. They would like the state to be more powerful. They would like people to be less powerful. And this is a tremendous emotional string that they can pull. And then there are people who say, how can we genuinely protect children? How can we harden these schools? How can we actually take more responsibility to take care of these children that are ours? And they would like to do a different thing. And I think that there are, of course, people advocating for gun control and weapon confiscation with good motives. But there's also a lot of people who are doing it with really problematic motives. You know, it was problematic was going to be said by me because it is a live stream. That's it's going to come out in all the live streams. This is something that will continue to be the most effective way to begin the gun control conversation, talking about gun violence and talking about children that have been killed. And it is also the most effective way to shut down any logical conversation about how many million firearms are here, how they are far more likely to be used to defend life than to take life. All that logical conversation can be shut down by the emotional stuff. But you already know all this because you've seen this time and time and time again. But the red flag stuff and the mental health stuff is where most of the future conversation is going to go because it is that end run around the Bruin decision that says that the second amendment matters and the second amendment needs to be applied very literally. And the second amendment says that you can't just do X, Y and Z. The end run is probably going to be this mental health stuff. So we're going to talk about mental health more tomorrow. We're going to talk more about red flag stuff tomorrow. And we're probably going to have an entirely new set of updates from Tennessee tomorrow because right now in back rooms in Tennessee, I mean not back rooms, they're offices. But they're offices that don't have cameras in them like the committee rooms and on the floor. There are conversations going on that are going to completely change what is going to be done tomorrow and what is actually going to pass. The amendments that go onto the bills, all that stuff is being discussed right now in Nashville. It's all going to be discussed more tomorrow. And theoretically, we'll know actually what happens by the end of the week. Everybody wants to go, nobody wants to be in Nashville. In fact, one of the things we should say is even the protesters didn't want to be in Nashville today. I don't know what all the factors were, but there were far more protesters on the hill and in the building than yesterday or earlier in March and April. It could be that it was about 100 degrees outside and the rules said that they weren't allowed to throw tantrums inside. And so it's too hot to throw tantrums outside and too many cops inside to throw tantrums inside. So it's possible. So fewer protesters, a lot more positive response from Tennessean saying, do not take away gun rights because of these particular fringe issues. And some unexpected backbone from legislators. I think all of these things have played a massive part in taking the special session, which was on track to be some kind of runaway train and get it back on track to be something that is a little bit more careful and a little bit more thought through and a little bit more representative of what Tennessean's actually want. But there's all of tomorrow. There's all of tonight for them to talk about the different stuff that could be amended to these three or four bills, to make deals and to get emails and calls from various people. So who knows? We will be back tomorrow at 5 p.m. Central to tell you what has transpired and spend a little bit more time talking about the mental health issues. So that is something that we will get to. Thank you very much for watching. We've gone about, we've gone the full hour. I am out of practice. We've not done live streams in a while. So I did not do a good job of following the chat, but I'm going to go back and look over these questions and we'll address some of the questions from this live stream tomorrow. If you were not able to watch the whole thing, then you're not listening to me tell you that you can also get it on the podcast, but we're also going to upload the audio to the podcast. So go subscribe to the podcast, go subscribe to our email updates. And if you would like to email Tennessee politicians, I'm going to put a link to a tool that makes it a little bit easier to do that. It helps you find the addresses and gives you gives you some ideas, some talking points. I'll put that in the description of this video as well. So have a great rest of your evening. We're going to go do some more research. Check in on all the different Tennessee politics group chats and we will give you an update tomorrow. Five o'clock central, one more TREX live stream to tell you what's going on and maybe we'll have an idea how much further into the week we have to go. How much further? How many more days? We'll have a better idea tomorrow. Have a great evening. We'll see you later.