The Tennessee Senate passed legislation Tuesday which would allow teachers with concealed carry permits to undergo more training then carry guns on their K-12 campuses for classroom defense.
The passage of the bill comes just over a year after a 28-year-old transgender woman shot and killed six on a Christian school campus where no one was armed for classroom defense. Police went so far as to indicate that the transgender had initially planned to target another location but decided to go after the Christian school instead, because the Christian school had a lower level of security.
On Tuesday, the Tennessee Senate took action, passing legislation outlining the necessary training for teachers who volunteer to be armed to defend their classrooms.
The Tennessean reported that the bill passed on a party-line vote of 26-5.
Beth Gebhard, a mother whose two children were Covenant school on the day of the attack and survived, spoke out against armed teachers, going so far as to suggest her children might have died if teachers had been armed: “If what had happened on March 27 had gone down the way that it did with a teacher armed with a handgun attempting to put the perpetrator out, my children would likely be dead.”
Gebhard did not mention a single incident in which an armed teacher has used his or gun to harm a student, although over 30 states allow teachers or other school employees to be armed on campus, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
On December 13, 2018, ten months after Florida’s Parkland high school shooting, the commission investigating the Parkland shooting voted 13 to 1 to arm teachers.
Breitbart News reported that Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, lead investigator on the commission, indicated the investigation into the attack had changed his views on armed teachers; that he went from opposing it to supporting it. He noted, “People need to keep an open mind to it as the reality is that if someone else in that school had a gun it could have saved kids’ lives.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a Turning Point USA Ambassador, and a pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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