Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – guest host Gulbransen welcomed Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs to the newsmaker line to discuss the Bill of Rights, 2nd Amendment, and the security of public schools.
Gulbransen: We have on our newsmaker line who I call Tennessee’s favorite mayor, Glenn Jacobs of Knox County. How are you doing this morning, sir?
Jacobs: Good morning, Aaron. How are you?
Gulbransen: Thank you for getting up. I appreciate it. Although you’re probably up way early earlier than this, working for the people in Knox County usually. So I appreciate your time.
Jacobs: I’m also in Eastern Time, so I gained an hour.
Gulbransen: Yes, that’s right. I always forget that it’s such a weird line in Tennessee where it’s like you drive two hours and then all of a sudden you gain an hour of sleep. How are things going in Knox County?
Obviously, there’s a lot of discussion on how to keep kids safe, and obviously, the Democrats are trying to restrict not in Knox County.
I’m sure the ones that live in Knox County would love to do this. But there are a lot of proposals floating around to restrict the Second Amendment. But Knox County has very safe schools for the kids.
Jacobs: We’ve done pretty much everything that you hear that’s been floated by security experts in the media as far as a single point of entry, they are all monitored.
You don’t just walk up to a door in a Knox County school and just walk right in. You have to be buzzed in and enter through the office. They’re all under video surveillance. We have SROs or SSOs at all the schools.
Of course, the Sheriff also increases his patrols of schools. So there’s going to be a very quick reaction time in case something were to happen.
I’ve done tabletop exercises with the school folks in which they work with all their partners, such as the emergency management people, the Sheriff, Knoxville Police Department, and everybody that might be involved, and put forth scenarios, such as an active shooter and how to deal with that.
And I remember at one such tabletop exercise, they learned some lessons of stuff that they had to do as far as the walkie-talkie is not talking to each other and the radio system is not functioning like they’re quite supposed to.
That was a few years ago, and we put more money into those systems to buy the equipment that was needed. So we live in a world, of course, where anything can happen and where we have a lot of uncertainty.
But I think as far as what our schools have done to secure the kids and to ensure a high level of safety is really probably about the best you can do.
What we see in some places, of course, is those systems are in place and they don’t work for whatever reason. We saw that in Parkland. We actually saw that recently in Texas as well. So, again, there are no guarantees, but we’ve done everything I think we can.
Gulbransen: We had a security expert on the show yesterday, Aaron Spradlin, and he was saying one of the things that can happen if somebody leaves a door open that shouldn’t be.
Or the kids go outside their high school kids and they want to go sneak a smoke or something or somebody’s late to class that could throw the whole perimeter into disarray. So there are issues with that.
Jacobs: Yes. And I think what the governor recently did, I was really proud of what he said about training and executive order, but also reaffirming gun rights in Tennessee. That’s one of the critical issues is training among everybody, even with teachers, to make sure that they’re not leaving doors open.
Gulbransen: And those were and I was very impressed by a number of videos, you made years ago with your insights into the Constitution, which was very cool to see and for me because I did watch it a little bit on TV years ago. (Jacobs chuckles)
But what does the Second Amendment mean to you? I mean, both as a Mayor and as a US citizen because it is a very important thing, and I think people don’t think about it very often until it’s under attack.
Jacobs: George Washington is often credited with saying that the Second Amendment is the teeth of the Bill of Rights. And the Bill of Rights is actually what makes America the country that’s based on the idea that folks have God-given rights.
They’re not given by government drives me nuts when people will say the Constitution grants are right. The Constitution doesn’t grant any rights.
What the Bill of Rights does is it recognizes certain God-given rights and says that the government, either one cannot trample on those or two, has an obligation to protect those.
That’s the actual reason for the existence of government in the United States. If you read the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said that’s why governments are instituted among men.
And again, that’s I think what separates us from the rest of the world, and that we at least philosophically, really do believe that the power lies with the people. And government’s job is to protect those rights, not that the people just fodder for whatever the king wants to do.
Gulbransen: I wouldn’t have expected you to be listening about an hour or so ago, but I wasn’t talking exactly about that. About the Second Amendment specifically.
Jacobs: Without the Second Amendment, gosh, if you’re mean to us, we’re going to say really bad things to you that just doesn’t work. The Second Amendment really represents that the power lies with the people.
Because in America, the people have the ability to defend themselves and if necessary, even against a tyrannical overreaching government.
Gulbransen: One of the things that the left says and also, I would say just people that think with their hearts or whatever, when we talk about like this, about the Second Amendment and some of the others that we’re heartless, and because the left will go, don’t you care about the children?
And it’s because we care about the children and the people of this country and that we do have a heart that in my opinion that we believe this way about the Constitution. And it’s kind of a shame that it gets bannered around like a football because of the politics of 2022.
Jacobs: Absolutely. Last weekend 50 people were slaughtered in a Church in Nigeria and pretty sure you’re going to find Nigeria has very strict gun control laws. You are at the whim of politicians if there aren’t protections put in place.
And we saw that through the pandemic I think that one of the reasons, frankly, that America didn’t go down the road that Canada or Australia did is because here the politicians knew that people weren’t going to put up with it.
But I saw some of the ideas that were floated and our politicians think the same way. I’d like to remind everybody what’s being talked about in Washington or what just passed.
These are the same people that said, oh, we just want to do this but we’re going to leave you alone after this but we just want to put red flag laws into place which are a violation of not only the Second Amendment but the fourth amendment.
The fifth amendment and the 14th amendment. Okay, but we’re going to put those into place. We just want to ban high-capacity magazines and all this stuff.
These are the same people that said 15 days to flatten the curve which morphed into 30 days to stop the spread which morphed into society being shut down. Our economy is destroyed.
People losing their jobs. Jobs, our lives destroyed. These are the same exact people and if you don’t think that they’re going to be the same thing with gun control how many times do we have to be taught the lesson of they’re just power-hungry and they will use any excuse used to achieve a political goal. And in this case, it is gun control.
Listen to the interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “Gun Show” by M&R Glasgow. CC BY 2.0.
When all else fails, the Second Amendment is the political right that protects all of the others.