After a shooter killed six people at Nashville’s Covenant School in 2023, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature ignored calls to pass gun control measures. Instead, they passed a series of increasingly punitive laws aimed not only at preventing future violence but dissuading kids from making threats that disrupt school and terrify other students.
Two contradictory laws went into effect before this school year began. One requires school officials to expel a student only if their investigation finds the threat is “valid,” a term that the law does not define. The other mandates that police charge people, including kids, with felonies for making threats of any kind, credible or not. As a result, students across the state can be arrested for statements that wouldn’t even get them expelled.
Tennessee has not yet released statewide data on how many arrests for threats of mass violence have been made since school started in August. But Hamilton County arrested 18 students in the first six weeks of the school year, more than twice as many as Nashville’s Davidson County — despite Hamilton having far fewer students. Data that ProPublica and WPLN obtained through a records request shows that at least 519 students were charged with threats of mass violence last school year, when it was a misdemeanor, an increase from 442 the prior year. Many of them were middle schoolers and most were boys. The youngest child charged last school year was 7 years old.
Tennessee’s child labor law allows children as young as 14 to work.
Prisoners are legal slaves and can be compelled to work.
I guess we have Trump’s solution to replacing all the jobs after expelling all the immigrants.
I am not disagreeing with you, just wanted to point out that the age minimum in the US is set at the federal level, and then the states can further restrict; I don’t think they can go below the federal limit:
I would feel more comfortable about that if it wasn’t clear that red states couldn’t give less of a shit what the federal law is anymore.
Absolutely agree.
Btw, the entertainment industry has also gotten their way with child labor, I just noticed this for CA: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/MinorsSummaryCharts.pdf
Sometimes we forget that child actors are labor too.
Prison slavery is actually now unconstitutional in the state, as of TN’s last election.