NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee teachers and staff will be allowed to carry concealed handguns on public school grounds under legislation signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee on Friday.
Lee, a Republican, had announced his support for the proposal just the day before while flanked by top Republican legislative leaders who had helped shepherd the bill through the GOP-dominant General Assembly.
“What’s important is that we give districts tools and the option to use a tool that will keep their children safe,” Lee told reporters.
As the idea of arming teachers began to gain support inside the General Assembly, gun control advocates and families began swarming to the Capitol to show their opposition. During the final vote, protesters chanted “Blood on your hands” and many members of the public who oppose the bill harangued Republican lawmakers after the vote, leading House Speaker Cameron Sexton to order the galleries cleared.
According to the statute, which becomes effective immediately, parents and other teachers will be barred from knowing who is armed at their schools.
A principal, school district and law enforcement agency would have to agree to let staff carry guns, and then workers who want to carry a handgun would need to have a handgun carry permit and written authorization from the school’s principal and local law enforcement. They would also need to clear a background check and undergo 40 hours of handgun training. They couldn’t carry guns at school events at stadiums, gymnasiums or auditoriums.
The legislation is the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville where shooter indiscriminately opened fire and killed three children and three adults before being killed by police.
Lee initially asked lawmakers to keep guns away from people deemed a danger to themselves or others in response to the shooting, the Republican supermajority ignored that request.
Many of the Covenant families had met with Lee and lawmakers hoping to persuade them to drop the idea of arming teachers. In the final days of the legislative session, Covenant families said they had collected nearly 4,300 signatures from Tennesseans against having public school staffers carry weapons on school grounds.
"There are folks across the state who disagree on the way forward, but we all agree that we should keep our kids safe,” Lee said Thursday.
It’s unclear if any school districts would take advantage if the bill becomes law. For example, a Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson, Sean Braisted, said the district believes “it is best and safest for only approved active-duty law enforcement to carry weapons on campus.”
Gov. Bill Lee attends a news conference at the close of the 2024 legislative session Thursday, April 25, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Gov. Bill Lee speaks during a news conference at the end of the 2024 legislative session, Thursday, April 25, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
LONDON (AP) — Thousands of ride-or-die Taylor Swift fans who missed out on her U.S. concert tour last year or didn't want to buy exorbitantly priced tickets to see her again found an out-of-the-way solution: Fly to Europe.
The pop star is scheduled to kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her record-setting Eras Tour in Paris on Thursday, and planeloads of Swifties plan to follow Miss Americana across the pond in the coming weeks. The arena where Swift is appearing said Americans bought 20% of the tickets for her four sold-out shows. Stockholm, the tour's next stop, expects about 10,000 concertgoers from the U.S.
A concert might sound like an odd raison d’etre for visiting a foreign country, especially when fans can watch the Eras Tour from home via the documentary now streaming on Disney+. Yet online travel company Expedia says continent-hopping by Swift’s devotees is part of a larger trend it dubbed “tour tourism” while observing a pattern that emerged during Beyoncé's Renaissance world tour.
Some North American fans who plan to fly overseas for the Eras Tour said they justified the expense after noticing that tighter restrictions on ticket fees and resales in Europe made seeing Swift perform abroad no more costly — and potentially cheaper — than catching her closer to home.
“They said, ’Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to go see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can take that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket, and three nights in a hotel room,” Melanie Fish, an Expedia spokesperson and travel expert, said.
That was the experience of Jennifer Warren, 43, who lives in St. Catharines, a city in the Niagara region of Ontario. She and her 11-year-old son love Swift but had no luck scoring what she considered as decently priced tickets in the U.S. Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to plan a European vacation around wherever she managed to get seats. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.
“You get out, you get to see the world, and you get to see your favorite artist or performer at the same time, so there are a lot of wins to it,” said Warren, who works as the director of research and innovation for a mutual insurance company.
The three VIP tickets she secured close to the stage — “I would call it brute-force dumb luck” — cost 600 euros ($646) each. Swift subsequently announced six November tour dates in Toronto, within driving distance of Warren's home. "Absolute nose-bleed seats" already are going for 3,000 Canadian dollars ($2,194) on secondary resale sites like Viagogo, Warren said.
Hard-core fans trailing their favorite singer or band on tour is not a new phenomenon. “Groupie” emerged in the late 1960s as a somewhat derogatory word for the ardent followers of rock bands. Deadheads took to the road in the 1970s to pursue the Grateful Dead from city to city.
More recently, music festivals like California’s Coachella and England’s Glastonbury, and concert residencies in Las Vegas by the likes of Elton John, Lady Gaga and Adele have attracted travelers to places they wouldn’t otherwise visit, Fish noted.
Travel and entertainment analysts have also spoken of a pent-up consumer demand for “experiences” over material objects since the coronavirus pandemic. Some think the willingness of music lovers to broaden their fandom horizons is part of the same mass cultural correction.
“It does seem like it’s more than a structural shift, maybe a personality transformation we all went through,” said Natalia Lechmanova, the chief economist for Mastercard in Europe.
As Swift hopscotches across Europe, Lechmanova expects restaurants and hotels to see the same boost that Mastercard observed within a 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) radius of concert venues in the U.S. cities she visited in 2023. The U.S. dollar's strong value against the euro may also increase retail spending on apparel, memorabilia, beauty products and supplies for the friendship bracelets fans exchange as part of the Eras Tour experience, the economist said.
Former college roommates Lizzy Hale, 34, who lives in Los Angeles, and Mitch Goulding, 33, who lives in Austin, Texas, already had tickets to see the Eras Tour in L.A. last summer when they decided to try to get ones for Paris, London or Edinburgh, Scotland, too. They saw a Europe concert trip as a makeup for travel plans they had in May 2020 to celebrate Goulding’s birthday but had to cancel due to the pandemic.
Goulding managed to secure VIP tickets for one of Swift's three Stockholm shows. He, Hale and two other friends scheduled a 10-day trip that also includes time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
“As people who enjoy traveling and enjoy music, if you can find an opportunity to combine the two, it's really special,” said Hale, who is pregnant with her first child.
The local economic impact of what the zeitgeist has termed “Swiftonomics” and the “Swift lift” can be considerable. Airbnb reported Tuesday that searches on its platform for the U.K. cities where Swift is performing in June and August — Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff and London — increased an average of 337% when tickets went on sale last summer.
Not to be outdone when it comes to trend-spotting, the property rentals company cited the demand as an example of “passion tourism,” or travel “driven by concerts, sports and other cultural events.”
In Stockholm, 120,000 out-of-towners from 130 countries -- among them 10,000 from the U.S. — are expected to swarm Sweden's capital this month, Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist Carl Bergqvist said. Stockholm is the only Scandinavian city on Swift's tour, and airlines added extra flights from nearby Denmark, Finland and Norway to bring people to the May 17-19 shows, he said.
The city's 40,000 hotel rooms are sold out even though prices skyrocketed for the tour dates, Bergqvist said. Concert visitors are expected to pump around 500 million Swedish kroner, or over $46 million, into the local economy over the course of their stays, an estimate that does not include what they paid for Swift tickets or to get to Sweden, he said.
“So this is going to be huge for the tourism sector in Sweden and Stockholm in particular,” Bergqvist said.
Nightclubs, restaurants and bars are seizing the opportunity to cater to fans with Taylor Swift-themed events, such as karaoke, quizzes and after-concert dance parties.
Houston resident Caroline Matlock, 29, saw Swift more than a year ago when the Eras Tour came to the Texas city. Now she's making more friendship bracelets and trying to learn a few words of Swedish as she prepares to see the 3 1/2-hour show in Stockholm. The idea of seeing Swift in Europe was her friend's, and Matlock needed some persuading at first.
“I was like, ‘I only want to go if it's a country I haven’t been to. I’ve seen Taylor Swift,'” she said.
Visiting the Swedish cities of Oslo and Gothenburg are on their itinerary. The concert is the last night of the trip and Matlock looks forward to interacting with Swifties from other countries: “Americans tend to have a very obsessive culture, especially Taylor Swift-related, so I'm curious if the crowd will be more toned-down.”
It remains to be seen if the music tourism trend has legs as long and strong as Swift's and Beyoncé's, and if it will carry over to Billie Eilish, Usher and other artists with world tours scheduled next year. Expedia's Fish thinks other big-name artists in Europe this summer will prove that booking a foreign trip around a concert is catching on.
Kat Morga, a travel consultant based in Nashville, isn’t so sure. Morga saw Swift perform in Nashville last year and helped two clients with school-aged children book European family vacations this summer that include seeing Swift in concert. But she thinks the difficulty of navigating ticket purchases through language barriers, currency conversions, international banking regulations and the risk of cancellations will limit the appeal of regular gig getaways.
“I think this is an anomaly,” Morga said. “People aren’t typically going to build their $20,000 huge family vacation only because Taylor Swift is there. She’s the one-off. She’s special.”
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel, whose company operates Booking.com, priceline.com, agoda.com, Kayak and OpenTable, is even less enthusiastic about concert tours as a tourism instigator. The Swift Effect causes a “little blip” when the superstar goes to smaller destinations, but for the worldwide travel industry, “one star touring around does not make a difference,” he said.
“It may just shift it a little bit. A person was going to go to the Caribbean for a week vacation. Instead that person (says), ‘Let’s travel to the Taylor Swift thing,'" Fogel said. "It doesn’t increase it. It just moves it from here to there.”
AP journalists Colleen Barry in Milan, Chisato Tanaka in Stockholm, Anne D'Innocenzio in New York, David Koenig in Dallas, Thomas Adamson in Paris and Brian Melley in London contributed reporting.
In this image taken from video, fans pose with a life-size image of Taylor Swift at a club that plays only Swift's music in Gothenburg, Sweden, on Tuesday, April 30th, 2024. Swift is scheduled to kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her record-setting Eras Tour on Thursday, May 9, 2024. There will be three shows in Stockholm. (AP Photo/Chisato Tanaka)
In this image taken from video, Taylor Swift fans sing and dance at a nightclub event called 'Ready for It' that only plays Swift's music in Gothenburg, Sweden, on Tuesday, April 30th, 2024. Swift is scheduled to kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her record-setting Eras Tour on Thursday, May 9, 2024. There will be three shows in Stockholm. (AP Photo/Chisato Tanaka)
In this image taken from video, Friends Arena in Stockholm, Sweden, is shown on Wednesday, April 24th, 2024. Taylor Swift is scheduled to kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her record-setting Eras Tour, with three shows in Stockholm, on Thursday, May 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Chisato Tanaka)
Drinks are prepared in the Black Dog pub, thought to be mentioned in a Taylor Swift song, in London, Saturday, May 4, 2024. As Taylor Swift prepares to launch the Europe leg of her blockbuster Eras tour, thousands of her fans from the U.S. and Canada are following her across the pond. Some Swifties decided to see Swift in one of the 18 cities on the pop star's tour after noticing that tighter restrictions on ticket fees and scalping in Europe made seeing Miss Americana perform abroad less of a splurge. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Taylor Swift fan Brodie MacArthur from east London poses with a friend's dog next to a sign featuring Taylor Swift lyrics outside The Black Dog pub in Vauxhall, London, Saturday, May 4, 2024. As Taylor Swift prepares to launch the Europe leg of her blockbuster Eras tour, thousands of her fans from the U.S. and Canada are following her across the pond. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
