A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, has reignited calls for gun reform. Students once again marched at the Tennessee State Capitol yesterday, days after a student at Antioch High School fatally shot a classmate and himself. As Marianna Bacallao of member station WPLN reports, the shooting comes less than two years after another tragedy unfolded at the covenant school.
MARIANNA BACALLAO, BYLINE: The chants, the signs, even some of the faces in the crowd are the same as two years ago.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) The students, united, will never be divided.
BACALLAO: But this time around, demonstrators are less optimistic. A groundswell movement for gun reform after the covenant school shooting in 2023 did not sway Tennessee's Republican supermajority.
DREW SPIEGEL: We're not naive.
BACALLAO: That's Drew Spiegel, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University and a survivor of a 2022 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
SPIEGEL: We know that the odds are stacked against us. We know that Republicans in the state - a lot of them have no intentions of making our community safer.
BACALLAO: Since Spiegel first started demonstrating at the Tennessee Capitol in 2023, the House has blocked off half the gallery seats from the public, and the speaker now has the power to ban spectators from the state house for up to two years for disruptive behavior.
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WILLIAM LAMBERTH: Until the last year or two, this has really not been an issue.
BACALLAO: That's House Majority Leader William Lamberth. Earlier this month, he explained why the rule was necessary to a group of reporters.
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LAMBERTH: There are 10 or 12 people that like to go up into the gallery and holler and shout little insults and cause a scene and make it all about them.
BACALLAO: Last time the state House saw a crowd this big showing up for gun reform, it was because Tennessee Governor Bill Lee had called a special session to address concerns after the covenant school shooting. This week's special session is all about school vouchers, disaster relief and immigration enforcement.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Are they going to be doing anything about the guns?
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: No.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: No, because they'd rather attack our immigrant refugee neighbors.
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BACALLAO: Governor Lee says he wants Tennessee to be ready to help with the president's mass deportation efforts.
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BILL LEE: What I believe is that President Trump was elected saying what he wanted to do, and the people elected him in a very strong fashion, and I am supportive of his strategies going forward.
BACALLAO: Members of Nashville's Latino community say the timing is rough. The father of Josselin Corea Escalante, the student killed at Antioch High School last week, says he fled from Guatemala to give his daughter a chance at life free from violence. For NPR News, I'm Marianna Bacallao in Nashville.
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