Don’t think the Republicans will defend you if you accidentally shoot a student.
Lets make classrooms even more unsafe:
It’s been barely a week since a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, massacred 19 children and two teachers, but Ohio Republicans have already snapped into action with a new bill that reduces the amount of training required for teachers and other school staff who want to carry handguns on school grounds.
House Bill 99 was reportedly rushed through both the state House and Senate in a single day. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has already announced that he plans to sign it into law.
Barring an unexpected development, this means that school staff will no longer have to go through the 737 hours of training required under current law to wield deadly weapons on campus. The new minimum amount of training outlined by the bill is 24 hours.
Under the tortured logic of the new Ohio legislation, armed school staff with only 24 hours of training will now be expected to do what Uvalde law enforcement could not: incapacitate or possibly kill a would-be mass shooter before a multitude of lives are lost. Such a policy could also make it more likely that a school employee will shoot someone who isn’t a deadly threat.
Apparently, teachers and cops aren’t too enthusiastic:
On Thursday, presidents of the top education worker unions in the state — the Ohio Education Alliance and the Ohio Federation of Teachers — issued a joint statement calling for DeWine to veto the bill.
“Our students need to be in safe learning environments where they can focus on getting a world-class education; they should not have to worry about what could happen with a gun in the hands of an undertrained individual in their classrooms with them,” the groups’ presidents wrote.
The Ohio Fraternal Order of Police opposes the law as well. When Ohio Republicans introduced a similar bill last year, the order’s director of government affairs, Mike Weinman, testified that the organization “strongly disagrees” with the law. Weinman reiterated the need for high-level training to effectively handle situations with guns. “Teachers and students will not receive this training level during an eight-hour concealed carry class or a weekend-long training class,” he said.
None of this will come as a surprise to people with common sense. It’s not a teacher’s job to combat gun violence, so many teachers in Ohio don’t want to do it. It is a police officer’s job to combat gun violence, and, knowing the difficulty of the job, they also don’t want teachers to do it, especially if they lack proper training.
I predict a lot of teachers will leave the profession if this sort of thing comes to their schools and it will become much more difficult to recruit new ones. And that will give the right wingers a secondary victory: destroying the public schools. It’s all good.