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An American Tragedy in Nashville

Ms. Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who lives in Nashville.

Residents of the Nashville apartment complex where the Waffle House shooting suspect lived watched on Monday as police officers worked near the wooded area where the man had been captured.Credit...Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

NASHVILLE — There is something fundamentally democratic about a Waffle House restaurant in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a place where people working the late shift can stop for a hot meal on the way home, where high school kids can extend prom night just an hour longer, where 20-somethings jazzed on live music can wind down after a night on the town. The coffee is always fresh, and the counter staff has heard it all before but will usually listen again if you need an ear. It’s a uniquely American place.

There’s something tragically, fundamentally American, too, about an angry young white man with a firearm killing a bunch of strangers who have done him no harm. That’s what happened early Sunday morning, when a man who was naked except for a green jacket loaded with ammunition opened fire with an AR-15 rifle at a Waffle House in the Antioch section of Nashville. Four people were fatally shot and four others were wounded before James Shaw Jr., an unarmed customer, wrestled the gun from him, saving untold lives.

The attacker ran away, shedding the jacket as he fled. Also left in his wake: Akilah Dasilva, DeEbony Groves, Joe Perez, and Taurean C. Sanderlin, all dead. All were in their 20s. All were people of color.

A search of the truck the gunman left behind led investigators to Travis Reinking, an Illinois man who had moved to Nashville only last fall. Considered armed and dangerous, Mr. Reinking immediately went to the top of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list. After some 34 hours at large in a cold rain, he was apprehended Monday afternoon clothed and wearing a backpack containing a loaded semiautomatic handgun.

For months, Mr. Reinking had shown “signs of significant instability,” according to Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. He believed that the musician Taylor Swift was stalking him, and he had been arrested by Secret Service agents last summer for crossing a security barrier at the White House, insisting that as “a sovereign citizen,” he had a right to speak with the president. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, links the “sovereign citizen” movement to the belief that African-Americans have fewer rights than whites.

After the White House incident, an investigation by the F.B.I. office in Springfield, Ill., led the sheriff’s office of Tazewell County to confiscate Mr. Reinking’s guns, but deputies later returned them to his father, a transfer Illinois law permits. On Sunday Mr. Aaron said the father “has now acknowledged giving them back to his son.”

We don’t need to press play on the gun lobby’s soundtrack to predict the response from politicians and right-wing media to this tragedy. Thoughts and prayers. This is no time for politics. Thoughts and prayers. We don’t have a gun problem; we have a mental-illness problem. Thoughts and prayers. Parents today can’t control their kids. More thoughts and more prayers, none of which have done anything to stop the violence. You would think the entire Republican Party would be mired in a collective crisis of faith by now.

Blame Mr. Reinking’s father, who clearly made a calamitous decision to trust his own troubled child, for the tragedy. Blame the stigma of mental illness, which may have made it feel impossible for the young man to seek help. Blame racist websites that fan hatred against people of color. Blame them all. The truth is, we know very little about what motivated Mr. Reinking, who is refusing to talk to the police.

But while we’re spreading blame, let’s not forget to save a generous portion for members of the Tennessee General Assembly, who are so busy passing legislation designed to punish the state’s left-leaning cities that they have passed no legislation at all to protect their own citizens from maniacs with guns.

Actually, let’s be very clear: They’ve done worse than nothing. Instead, they’ve expanded gun rights to such an extreme that Tennessee is now the go-to place for gun transfers that wouldn’t be permissible in other places. This month The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that the F.B.I. had identified Tennessee as a “source state” in a pipeline that transferred guns and ammunition from unwitting private sellers in Tennessee to convicted felons in California. “It is very common for suppliers of firearms to obtain their supply from states with more lenient firearms laws, which are also known as source states,” Kimberly Vesling, an F.B.I. agent, explained.

As I have written here before, Tennessee has some of the most permissive gun laws in the country, though no one seems to know whether a man whose right to own a gun had been revoked by another state is prohibited by Tennessee law from owning the same gun here. The weapons “would not have been lawfully in his hands in Illinois,” Nashville’s police chief, Steve Anderson, said at a news conference on Sunday. “Now, possessing them in Tennessee, I don’t know that he would have violated any Tennessee law.”

Here’s what we do know: Because Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly — owned lock, stock and soul by the National Rifle Association — will not require people here to register their guns, four beautiful young people with their whole lives ahead of them are being mourned by an entire city, and all the thoughts and prayers in the world will not bring them back to us.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer.

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