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\n\tCountry music has a long history with guns and gun culture, from songs about handing down family heirloom rifles<\/a> to harvesting that first buck of the season. Ketch Secor<\/a>, the leader of Old Crow Medicine Show<\/a>, is a gun owner, but never thought he\u2019d become a staunch advocate for gun reform<\/a>. That changed after the 2023 Covenant<\/a> school shooting in Nashville, which left three children and three adults dead.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI didn\u2019t think that\u2019d be a cause for me\u2026 But when the shooting happens in your town, it\u2019s different,\u201d Secor tells Rolling Stone<\/em> during this week\u2019s episode of the Nashville Now<\/a><\/em> 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<\/em>, about America\u2019s gun violence issue.<\/p>\n \n\tSecor 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<\/a> in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire, killing 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI thought, \u2018Well, 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,\u2019\u201d Secor says. \u201cI\u2019ve 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 \u2014 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\u2019t have guns.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSecor says the question often asked after a mass shooting is why the person was allowed to have a gun. \u201cThere\u2019s something for that: It\u2019s called a red flag law,\u201d he says. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n