Country music has a long history with guns and gun culture, from songs about handing down family heirloom rifles to harvesting that first buck of the season. Ketch Secor, the leader of Old Crow Medicine Show, is a gun owner, but never thought he’d become a staunch advocate for gun reform. That changed after the 2023 Covenant school shooting in Nashville, which left three children and three adults dead.
“I didn’t think that’d be a cause for me… But when the shooting happens in your town, it’s different,” Secor tells Rolling Stone during this week’s episode of the Nashville Now podcast. He began lobbying for gun reform, including red flag laws and a ban on assault weapons, and produced a forthcoming documentary, Louder Than Guns, about America’s gun violence issue.
Secor contrasts his response to a mass shooting with that of mainstream country star Jason Aldean, who was performing onstage at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire, killing 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“I thought, ‘Well, Mr. Aldean can stand up there at a shooting and make his choice for what to do when the volley is coming at his actual audience,’” Secor says. “I’ve made a different choice than maybe some other country musicians have made, but what I did is make a blueprint for others to make a similar choice, if they so choose. And I sure hope they will — because country has a unique opportunity to bring together the very folks who could make that minuscule difference to create a red flag law, for example, that would have kept this firearm out of the hand of a person who obviously shouldn’t have guns.”
Secor says the question often asked after a mass shooting is why the person was allowed to have a gun. “There’s something for that: It’s called a red flag law,” he says. “The people here in the center and on the right in the music business with a million followers or more, they can do something about it.”
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Secor, a member of the Grand Ole Opry with Old Crow, released his solo album Story the Crow Told Me, earlier this summer. He recently became the new host of Tennessee Crossroads, a travelogue series airing on public television.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Charley Crockett, Gavin Adcock, Margo Price, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, and Clever.
