Sarah Shoop Neumann, one of the Covenant School parents who assisted with launching a gun control lobbying group after a shooter murdered six people at the school, was invited to the White House in support of the Biden administration’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
The Covenant School, which is affiliated with Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, made headlines earlier this year after the shooter, an alumna of the Covenant School and a woman who claimed identity as a man, murdered three nine-year-old children and three adult staff members. Parents later launched a political advocacy group which supported efforts to pass a red flag law in Tennessee last month, a statute which would have permitted officials to take firearms away from those considered at risk to themselves or others.
Neumann, who was quoted in a press release announcing the Covenant Families Action Fund, previously leveraged the emotional power of the shooting to criticize lawmakers she saw as insufficiently responding to the murders and to endorse the red flag law as a “common sense gun safety” measure. She said on social media that she was “honored to be invited to the White House to hear remarks on the creation of the first national Office of Gun Violence Prevention” and that she had brought a “direct survivor” of the massacre to the event.
“Our nation is recognizing gun violence is a national public health crisis and making plans to address it,” she commented on social media. “The hope of seeing people and organizations from all over the country come together to help prevent any other family or community from experiencing the trauma of gun violence.”
Though the lobbying efforts launched by the Covenant School parents claim to represent “a wide range of political views,” President Joe Biden said in a recent statement about the Office of Gun Violence Prevention that the entity would “take common sense actions that the majority of Americans support like enacting universal background checks and banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” The commander-in-chief also noted that he has “taken more executive action than any President in history” on the issue of gun control.
Even as proponents of gun control assert that most of the population supports new regulations, surveys show that gun control efforts, including red flag laws, are unpopular among the vast majority of Republican voters and many independents. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention and a supporter of the gun control efforts in Tennessee, has nevertheless asserted that the proposal in the state differs from a red flag law since only police can “file a petition before the court to have firearms confiscated” and an individual can “only be dispossessed of the firearms” after a court process.
Brent Leatherwood, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission and a fellow Covenant School parent, released a letter earlier this year supporting the red flag bill even as he faced criticism for leveraging Southern Baptist institutions to advance interests contrary to the denomination’s churches. One source familiar with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission previously asserted to The Sentinel that Leatherwood was one of the unnamed Covenant School parents reported to be involved in delaying the release of the shooter’s manifesto.
