When I was growing up in Tennessee, the state’s politics were–as was often said of Howard Baker, the centrist Senator who embodied them–like its namesake river: right down the middle. That era is long-vanished, as this week’s expulsion of two Democratic lawmakers from their seats made abundantly clear. But there was a glimmer of it a few days earlier when in the wake of the horrific school massacre in Nashville, two former governors of opposite parties joined forces to lay out a path for gun reform. In an op-ed in The Tennessean, Democrat Phil Bredesen and Republican Bill Haslam, who served as governor successively from 2003 to 2019, offered some specifics around “small step” gun restrictions as starting points.