Arming Teachers Can Increase Safety
BY: State Senator Bob Beers
Fifteen years ago, Nevada’s Legislature granted the request of the Clark County School District administration to make it illegal for adults to carry a gun onto our school campuses. Administrators testified that they were seizing between 15 and 20 guns per school year in Clark County alone, and that they hoped by banning adults from carrying, they would send students a strong message, decreasing the number of guns seized and increasing student safety.
It didn’t work. So far this year, the Clark County School District is on track to meet or exceed the 50 guns it seized during the last school year. Numbers are likely proportional in Washoe County.
Meanwhile, we can no longer deny that ours is a world with terrorism, and our schools are a vulnerable point. We also know (from past interrogations of terrorists) that they do their best to select targets offering smaller chances that they will encounter return force. Several years ago, a group of Muslim terrorists seized a school in Russia, killing 160 children and almost as many adults and parents. Yet our society seems to shun any serious discussion of safety in our schools.
To jump start such discussion, I will be introducing legislation this session to lift Nevada’s ban on carrying weapons in schools for people who have passed a 40-hour course in gun safety, handling and ethics that is more rigorous than what we require of our law enforcement officers. The program would be completely voluntary, and involve no expenditure by taxpayers.
More than 100 years prior to the 1990 ban, there are no cases of teachers having accidents, kids mugging teachers for guns, or teachers using guns for academic discipline. Lifting this unsuccessful ban is a highly efficient method for increasing the safety of our most precious resource, our children.
More Guns in Schools is Not the Answer
BY: Keith Rheault, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Nevada Department of Education
The Federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 required each state to have in effect a state law requiring school districts to expel for at least one year any student who brings a gun to school or possesses a gun in school. The Nevada Legislature adopted such a law in 1995. The rationale for the federally imposed requirement was two-fold: one was to remove potentially dangerous students from the school environment, and the second was to serve as a deterrent to discourage students from bringing firearms to school. The overall purpose of the act was to make the school environment safer by reducing the number of firearms present in schools.
Legislation authorizing teachers who have completed a specified training curriculum to carry their own firearms on school grounds would be contradictory to the overall purpose of the Gun-Free Schools Act. If the primary purpose of such legislation is to prevent or deter a person from bringing or using a gun on school grounds, it will not be any more effective than the current gun-free schools requirement. Any student, determined to create an incident with a firearm at a school, will do so regardless of whether they face a year’s expulsion or the fact that there might be a gun locked in a teacher’s desk drawer. Limiting the authorized number of guns on a school campus to trained school police officers made sense in 1994, and still does today.
The need for ongoing professional development of Nevada’s teachers has never been greater, based on the challenges faced with educating our current student population. Any money or time spent on the training of teachers to use and carry firearms would be better spent on professional development efforts to increase student achievement. The public schools and education profession as a whole have been criticized in the past for trying to provide all things for all children, in this case, leave the security and safety of our children in schools to trained professionals, and leave the education of our children to the teachers.