‘MaKayla’s Law’: Bill aiming to reduce child gun deaths fails in Tennessee Senate committee

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — The Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday narrowly blocked a bill that would have penalized gun owners for leaving a firearm loaded and accessible to a child.

Under Senate Bill 1785, also known as “MaKayla’s Law,” gun owners would have potentially faced a Class C felony of reckless endangerment if a child under 13 found a gun, discharged it and killed either themselves or another person.

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The legislation didn’t mandate how guns are stored in the home. Rather, the bill’s sponsor Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville) said it was only intended to “hold gun owners responsible” if a child got ahold of a weapon that was not safely secured.

“When a child unintentionally shoots themselves, or a friend, or a sibling with a gun, it’s not a tragic accident. It is 100% a preventable tragedy,” Campbell said during committee Tuesday. “Our state experiences far too many of these preventable tragedies.”

Data complied through Tennessee Under the Gun, a project created by the Tennessee Senate Democratic Caucus, indicates there were at least 24 unintentional shootings involving kids with access to unsecured firearms in the state last year.

“We ranked fourth in the nation,” Campbell said. “Already this year there have been two such shootings, both of them resulting in death.”

Who is MaKayla Dyer?

Efforts to pass MaKayla’s Law have been ongoing for almost a decade now. Campbell said the bill has been reintroduced almost every year since 8-year-old MaKayla Dyer was shot and killed in East Tennessee in October 2015, but it has failed every time.

The shooting happened after Dyer, a student at White Pine Elementary, reportedly refused to show her 11-year-old neighbor her puppies. Once Dyer told the boy, “No,” officials said he reached into a closet where he knew his dad kept a loaded 12-gauge shotgun, pointed the barrel out his window and pulled the trigger.

The blast hit Dyer directly in the chest. The boy was found guilty of murder in February 2016 and sentenced to remain in state custody until his 19th birthday. However, Campbell said there were never any repercussions for the boy’s father.

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“He was not held accountable in any way, even though it was his irresponsible actions that resulted in the death of an innocent little girl,” she said. “MaKayla should currently be a high school junior planning college visits and getting ready for prom. Instead, her life was cut short.”

Cathy Barnett, a mother and retired teacher from Franklin, also testified in support of the bill on Tuesday on behalf of Moms Demand Action, one of the largest gun violence prevention organizations in the country.

During her testimony, Barnett said Dyer is just one of many children who have been lost in similar shootings, referencing the 2015 death of 15-year-old DaVontae Ziegler, who was shot by an 11-year-old boy while sitting outside his home in North Nashville.

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“You can imagine this with your own child. [His] family and friends were destroyed and still are,” she said. “There is no coming back, no moving on, no tomorrow when your precious child is taken from you in this manner. It’s a wound that never heals.”

Barnett also pointed to research by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund showing 2023 was one of the worst years on record for unintentional shootings by children, with over 400 incidents reported nationwide.

“Every time a child is shot it is a tragedy, but shootings by children are especially devastating because they are completely preventable,” Barnett said. “Every time a child gets access to a gun without an adult’s knowledge or supervision, some grownup has failed.”

Where ‘MaKayla’s Law’ fell short

Tennessee law already prohibits a parent from intentionally giving a handgun to a minor if they know there is a “substantial risk” that child could use the gun to commit a felony. However, there are no specific laws penalizing someone who leaves a gun accessible to a minor.

During committee Tuesday, Mike Dunavant, Executive Director of Legal Services and Policy at Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference, said it would be possible to prosecute someone in these instances under current reckless endangerment statutes, but there are “challenges to establishing the state of mind that’s necessary to prove culpability.”

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According to Campbell, “MaKayla’s Law” was intended to make it easier for prosecutors to take on cases involving children accessing an unsecured gun. Even then, Dunavant said prosecutors would have had to examine past behaviors and efforts of gun owners to secure their firearms to determine whether they were reckless or negligent with the weapon — another difficult task.

“That’s what I have to prove, and that’s very difficult because you have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” he explained. “Of course, many gun owners would say, ‘I took all reasonable efforts that I knew to hide the gun, to store the gun, to remove it from the knowledge of the child, but nonetheless the child still got to it.’”

Sen. Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), who voted against the bill Tuesday, has also spoken out against “MaKayla’s Law” in the past, describing the measure as well-intended but creating other consequences.

“We might fix it with this situation,” he told News 2. “But at the same time create 15 to 20 situations where someone who is the potential victim of a home invasion can’t get to a gun, can’t get a trigger lock opened, and things are going on and they are killed.”

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Another opponent of the bill included the Tennessee Firearms Association, which argued the law could have impacted gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. The organization’s executive director John Harris pointed to the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen Decision, which cemented the ability to carry a pistol as a guarantee under the Constitution.

“What the Supreme Court said is under the Second Amendment now, they cannot in the absence of shoring a national and historical tradition that existed as of 1791 pass a law, particularly a criminal consequence law, that restricts a constitutionally protected right,” Harris said.

During discussion of the bill Tuesday, Sen. Kerry Roberts (R-Springfield) explained that he thinks safe storage is an important topic, but he struggles with creating a law penalizing gun owners, saying, “What this topic really needs, is it needs publicity.”

However, the bill did see some support from other Republicans. Sen. Paul Rose (R-Covington) said his whole family has been around firearms all their lives and gun owners who “don’t know enough to keep a gun out of children’s hands ought to not have one.”

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“There’s just common sense. If you own a gun, you know the gun is capable of causing harm,” he said. “You don’t have to be educated to know you need to keep the gun in a safe spot from children. To me, it’s a commonsense bill.”

Ultimately, the bill failed in a vote of three in favor, four against and two present not voting.

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