By all accounts, Artemis Rayford was a happy, vibrant 12-year-old. He loved playing football and wearing his Tennessee Titans jersey. As a sixth-grader at Memphis, Tennessee’s Sherwood Middle School, Rayford had participated, just before the last year’s winter break, in a program his school coordinated with the Memphis Police Department—intended to discourage violence and gang activity. He and his fellow students learned about a new law passed in Jul. 2021 by the Tennessee legislature and signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee. That law allows most people over the age of 21 in Tennessee to carry a gun, concealed or openly, without any permit.

Rayford thought the law made no sense, and described why in a letter he wrote to the governor. As reported by Lateshia Beachum, writing for the Washington Post, the letter said, among other things, “It is my opinion that this new law will be bad and people will be murdered.” It also stressed that anyone who bought a gun should know how to use it.

Rayford never found out whether Lee ever read or even received his letter. But he probably wasn’t thinking about that on Christmas morning when, as he was playing with his new Christmas toys, a stray bullet came from outside his family’s home, pierced his chest, and ended his life. According to his grandmother, interviewed for Memphis’ CBS affiliate, NewsChannel3, Rayford died in his mother’s arms, covered in blood. 

Explaining later why he signed the law, Lee had brushed aside objections from law enforcement, saying, “It shouldn’t be hard for law-abiding Tennesseans to exercise their Second Amendment rights.” Lee also apparently ignored data that had shown a dramatic uptick throughout 2021 in gun-related homicides in the city of Memphis, with many of those deaths occurring to children.

To the contrary, as reported by the Tennesseean, Lee warmly thanked the National Rife Association (NRA) last year for helping him pass the law (acting through Lee’s legislative liaison, NRA director Matt Herriman, the gun lobby essentially wrote it), which he characterized as a “public safety measure.” He also praised the bill itself for “allow[ing] the citizenry to be protected against a tyrannical government.” It’s fairly clear that children such as Rayford were never a serious consideration and the measure was solely driven by the gun lobby.

On Thursday, the Post’s Editorial Board followed up on Beachum’s original story, explaining how gun violence has surged leading up to and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. An extraordinary number of the victims have been children.

The Post ends its editorial with a plea for government officials to recognize the unchecked spread of guns for the public health issue it is.

Of course, gun proponents will point out that there is no proof that Tennessee’s slavish capitulation to the gun manufacturers’ lobby had anything to do with Rayford’s death. From the reports thus far, it’s possible that no one will ever know who pulled the trigger that killed him. But for Republicans, the right to own guns and the harm they actually can cause are no longer even equivalent concerns.

Even the phrase “Second Amendment rights” now carries with it the clear implication of the “right” to threaten others with a gun in the name of “freedom” (a related bill is now winding through the Tennessee legislature lowering the legal gun-carrying age threshold to 18). And this almost religious, pro-gun mindset certainly doesn’t contemplate the victims of gun violence in the country’s cities, because racism is now part of the equation. Objections to gun control are invariably cast in racially coded terms like “those people don’t pay attention to gun laws,” thus perversely justifying more and more guns in the hands of “law-abiding” (read: white) citizens. 

But many states are now rendering that specious objection completely moot: There are, increasingly, fewer and fewer gun laws to “pay attention” to. With the elimination of nearly all common-sense restrictions on who can use, buy, and carry guns in places like Tennessee, Texas, and other Republican-dominated states, there is only one certain outcome, the same outcome that was obvious to a 12-year-old boy just before his life was brutally cut short:

“People will be murdered.”