Tennessee Firearms Association in conjunction with Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in 2023 seeking access to the records that were being gathered by Metro Nashville Police Department ("MNPD") concerning the Covenant murders.  Those records included writings and other materials that the MNPD seized from the shooter's vehicle, home and potentially other locations. 

MNPD claimed that it did not have to release the records until its investigation of the deceased shooter was over (it never identified another person of interest).  That investigation officially ended in early 2025 - curiously within a week after the TFA filed its appellate brief.

In the trial court, many attorneys representing Covenant Church, Covenant School, the Covenant parents, all sought to intervene to forever block public access to the records - mainly the records seized from the shooter and to some extent records related to "school security."  

Ultimately, the trial court ruled that the records were protected based on three theories - an allegedly open criminal investigation (of a deceased shooter), a public records exception pertaining to "school security" records, and the court's conclusion that the federal Copyright Act somehow required a finding under Article VI (federal supremacy) that the records were exempt from disclosure under the state open records act. 

Today, October 30, 2025, the case is set for oral argument in the court of appeals.  The oral argument should be streamed live on the court's YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGTpv7HZq4Oc8S4RDboVvAA

But, did you know that many of the shooter's records are already publicly available?   Apparently, copies of many of the records were provided by local or state officials to the FBI.  Federal law does not have a copyright exception to federal Freedom of Information Act requests.   The FBI's "Vault" has four PDF's of records containing over 1300 pages related to the Covenant School shooting.  Some of those FBI records are clearly pages from the shooter's logs and in her own handwriting.  https://vault.fbi.gov/nashville-covenant-school-shooting   (Of course, Tennessee's new media sources are not sharing that information).

In due course, the Tennessee Court of Appeals will issue a ruling.  That ruling could be appealed again or it could send the case back to the trial court.   Indeed, it could take years for this litigation to finally conclude.   

But whatever the outcome, many of the relevant records are already publicly available.