As your next Governor, I vow to repeal the school sentinel program and make it illegal for anyone other than a uniformed law enforcement officer to enter school grounds with a firearm.
The House voted today to spend more money to put our children at greater risk of injury or death by firearms. House Bill 1152 would pay $1,500 to a school district for every teacher, lunch lady, or other school employee it can convince to go through gunslinger training and pack heat around our children. HB 1152 caps the payouts at $45,000.
I’d like to believe this is an effort by Republican yahoos to buy support for a program that, seven years after its misguided passage, the vast majority of South Dakota have continue to reject as an unnecessary hazard to our children’s safety. Our children grow up surrounded by enough harmful images of ammosexuality; the last thing we need is for our schools to now affirm the notion that guns solve problems by having teachers model the America’s rampant and destructive gun fetish in class. I can only hope that a $1,500 pittance won’t be enough to pry sensible schools away from their wise resistance to the gun-maniacs who just want our children indoctrinated into the gun cult as early and often as possible on the public dime. (Remember, kids: you will forever find books and pens far more useful for solving your problems than any firearm.)
I am profoundly sad that a majority of members of the South Dakota House of Representatives are willing to spend money on putting more guns and gunslingers in schools. Let’s hope someone in the Senate hoghouses this bill to reappropriate that $45,000 to simply hire one who’ll teacher for some lucky district to come in and teach the kids French. That will do more good for some lucky school than any quantity of guns and ammos secreted into the classroom in the lunch pail of some teacher dreaming he’s Dirty Harry.
Related Gunplay: On Thursday morning, House Agriculture and Natural Resources (what? Not House Education?) will take up House Bill 1256, some other Republicans’ brilliant idea to raise taxes and spend the proceeds to force every school district to start a gun sports program.
FOOLS on MULES … Representatives Hammock, Beal, Brunner, Chaffee, Dennert, Deutsch, Finck, Goodwin, Gosch, Hansen, Jensen (Kevin), Johnson (Chris), Johnson (David), Karr, Marty, Mills, Mulally, Otten (Herman), Perry, Peterson (Sue), Pischke, Qualm, Randolph, Rasmussen, Steele, Wangsness, and Weis and Senators Stalzer, Greenfield (Brock), and Monroe
There are actually a couple good SDGOP bills in today’s DFP lineup, but they couldn’t let it go at that. No, they had to tack on stupid. Damn.
$45,000 looks like a school counselor or nurse or art or music teacher. Remember that budget surplus too. What a waste of badly needed $.
I doubt a fellow could hire a counselor or nurse for $45,000. The retirement and payroll taxes alone would probably cut that to way less than $40,000 without even taking into account the insurances and vacations and desk and chair and nurse uniforms. So unless you can get a nurse for $35,000, forget it.
Art teacher, maybe.
PS: The janitors should be the only ones toting the shooting irons.
Janitors or teachers or lunch workers with guns will increase school shootings. School shooters have things in common. They’re drawn to confrontation with other guns. They’re carrying a death wish. Guns in schools feed their need.
Porter is absolutely correct. You know what would be better? Use that $1,500 for free pizza, and a band. Lift students’ spirits, encourage student solidarity and don’t make them feel they are prisoners at the penitentiary.
If the Legislature were serious about school safety, it wouldn’t engage in the personal Rambo theater of school gunslingers with pistols in their pants. It wouldn’t put up less than the target salary of a single teacher to put guns in schools. If gunslingers in schools really have any positive effect on school safety, the Legislature should be willing to pay the millions of dollars a year it costs to put armed school resource officers, professional law enforcement personnel who undergo continual training and whose attention 100% of the time is on school safety, not half-time hacks who take a gun course and carry a pistol just in case while their minds should be on carrying out their primary school duties.
Security done on the cheap, by non-professionals, is not real security. It’s a crap shoot.