State Sen. Brent Taylor says local school system leaders should keep quiet about their decision to not allow teachers and other school staff to carry guns.

The Eads Republican commented the same week that leaders of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools system reemphasized that the state’s largest school system will not be opting into a new state law that allows teachers and other school staff to be armed while school is in session.

The law also requires the permission of the school system as well as firearms training and a handgun permit.

MSCS won’t allow teachers to carry guns

Taylor met with school system leaders Thursday, May 23, before speaking that evening at the Whitehaven Republican Club at the Georgette and Cato Johnson YMCA.

“I said all of these school systems that come out and say, ‘We’re opposed to this. We are not going to have any armed teachers in our schools’ — please stop saying that,” Taylor told the group of 50. “Regardless of how you may feel about arming teachers, it at least has the benefit of some criminal who is looking to do harm to think that there may be an armed teacher there. So quit saying that.”

Taylor’s speech and responses to questions from the audience were dominated by crime legislation he sponsored in this year’s session of the legislature including changes to bail reform processes made in Shelby County.

The county also lost a circuit court judge’s position and criminal court division in the legislature this year – something Taylor opposed.

He says up-to-date data like the weighted case studies on the work of both courts might reverse the decision. But Taylor also said he wants to study more closely the role of judicial commissioners in Shelby County who are the first point of contact in criminal cases.

“I’m beginning to wonder if our heavy reliance on judicial commissioners is impacting that weighted case study and showing our judges aren’t working enough … because our judicial commissioners are doing a lot of the work,” he said. “That’s something I want to look at this summer.”

Taylor’s tough on crime stance drew some resistance from Latesha Williams who said it doesn’t get at the root causes of crime.

“What is irritating the most is people that look like me don’t see and understand what is going on. The root cause of this is poverty,” she said. “Do you go to these neighborhoods? Do you talk to these parents? … There is a deep-rooted problem in our city and locking them up and throwing away the key is not helping.”

Taylor cited bills he’s passed to fund violence intervention programs as well as the impact he says school voucher programs and the creation this year of the University of Memphis k-12 school system could have in access to better education.

“Our crime problem is so acute we have to deal with that first and then we can tackle these other long term causes of crime,” he told Williams.

Blended sentencing bill heads to governor’s desk

After the speech, Taylor defended his motto of “making Memphis matter” in the Capitol with the bills that pushed back on bail reforms in Shelby County and supported Republican priorities like school vouchers.

“Make Memphis matter really is more about getting Memphis to understand Nashville a little better. But more importantly, it’s about getting Nashville and the legislature to understand Memphis,” he said. “They don’t understand Memphis. Memphis is a very unique city. It’s a large city. It’s got a lot of seeming contradictions.”

One is his presence at the year-old Republican Club in Whitehaven, an area that is a key constituency in the county’s Democratic majority. The suburbs outside Memphis are majority Republican and are the largest block of red votes in a single county in Tennessee too.

“We are in the middle of a blue county. More Republican votes come out of Shelby County than any other county in the state. But we’re a blue county,” Taylor said. “That seems to be a contradiction they really can’t wrap their heads around. We have no committee chairmen in the Senate from West Tennessee — no commissioners from west Tennessee.”

So Taylor is bringing legislators from other parts of the state and state commissioners to the city “just learning that we are more than a headline — that we are an asset worth investing in.”