I am not a lawyer or a legislator, but here is my idea:
As the events in Newtown this past week and the Secret Service Safe School Initiative report has proven since 2002, the concept of a Gun Free School zone to prevent the mass shootings of our kids has proven to be a colossal failure.
The State of Florida must end once and for all a practice that may invite criminals and mentally disturbed people to freely walk into our schools and commit unspeakable crimes. In order to do so, we need to allow teachers, other school personnel and parents the ability to defend the children against such attacks. And for that we need to allow them to use the most effective tools to stop any attack: Firearms.
In these tough economic times, we cannot impose taxes on the citizens of the State to provide for police protection for every school or pay for armed security. However the State of Florida is fortunate to have amongst its citizens close to one million individuals that have been proven themselves to be amongst the best law-abiding citizens in the country: Concealed Weapons Permit carriers.
Concealed Weapons Permit carriers have a record unmatched by any other group or even the common citizen: Only 0.3% of licenses have been removed because the person had committed a felony. These are people who have been through firearms safety training, background checks, photographed and fingerprinted to carry a personal sidearm.
Proposal:
-To remove the prohibition of carrying a weapon on any school grounds in the State to those who have a valid Florida Concealed Weapons Permit.
-To order local school boards that they are not allowed to ask a teacher or school personnel if they have Concealed Weapons Permit during class or such Concealed Weapons Permit cannot be used to terminate employment or serve as base for refusal to hire a teacher or any other school personnel.
– Non compliance with the above will result in a $10,000 penalty to the individual who terminates or refuses employment. Payment of the fine will not come out of any local, state or federal taxpayer-funded source.
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To that we can add lawsuit protection for the school board against the very improbable and very few misdeeds a CWP holder may do.
Go ahead and add your 2 cents.
Some good ideas. It’s too bad it will never happen.
Never say never. I Never thought obama would be re-elected….there may be hope for us yet…. 🙂
There are a few things I think would help making such a proposal successful:
-A reminder that a right is not a mandate. Allowing a trained law abiding person to carry is not the same as requiring them to do so.
-I suspect that a higher level of training would be required
I don’t remember who posted it (Pincus maybe?), but I read something recently that made perfect sense to me. We don’t train our teachers to be fire fighters, or EMTs, we train them just enough to hold down the fort until the professionals arrive. Nor should we be training them to be soldiers, but they should be aware of things they can do to hold down the fort until the police arrive. Basic training on how to barricade doors, what materials stop bullets, using a fire extinguisher as a weapon, etc.
I think I read something along those lines and also disagree. If you are facing direct life-threatening action, chances are it is one or two individuals rather than a group that will require barricades. In the case of Mass Idiotic Shooters, the majority will turn tail and eat the gun by just confronting them. I rather make sure to send the attacker to the other side of Styx in case he turns out to be the ornery one.
Yeah well teachers have 3 mos. off every year on the taxpayer dime so that is plenty of time to train. I’m tired of this nonsense that a graduate degree is necessary to teach 3rd grade, or that teachers need hours out of the workday to “grade papers” and the summer to “develop a lesson plan.” Teachers union B.S.
So fine, let them spend their summers learning EMT and firearms training.
No training required. Point open end at bad guy, pull trigger.
Don’t forget, these mass murderers are not trained marksmen. All that is required is to stop restricting the right of competent adults to defend themselves with a gun if they so choose.
Why is a school any more special than the grocery store, doctor’s office or main street USA where people with no special training manage to not have mass murder every day?
I would think that the hardest part of that program would be to replace almost all of the current teachers with new ones that won’t pitch a hissy if they have to hang around with “all those nasty guns”.