On November 17 Kern High School District (KHSD) trustees voted to allow teachers with concealed permits to carry guns on campus for defense of themselves and their students.

A coalition of advocacy groups is now pressuring the school district to reverse the decision, effectively guaranteeing the teachers will be unarmed should an attacker enter the building.

Bakersfield.com reported that KHSD trustees voted 3-2 to allow teachers with permits to carry on campus. Trustee Phillip Peters said: “I’ve made my beliefs pretty clear. This is a step toward making our campuses safer for students and staff. I don’t always know what the right decision is, but I do believe this is the best direction.”

Yet according to Bay Area public radio station  KQED, a number of advocacy groups want the policy reversed. The groups include “Building Healthy Communities, United Farm Workers, California State University Bakersfield Center for Social Justice and the Kern Education Justice Collaborative,” and they have launched an online petition that has garnered 168 signatures at the time of this article.

Gerald Cantu, the Dolores Huerta Foundation’s civic engagement director, said, “It just creates a terrible school climate, you know, where children potentially may be entering classrooms in which their teachers have guns. That’s not the kind of message we want to send to children.”

Cantu did not talk about the school climate that was created at Sandy Hook Elementary when Adam Lanza entered the building to attack students and staff.  The latter were prohibited from being armed to stop him. It is that very kind of attack that KHSD trustees were trying to prevent when they voted to allow teachers with concealed permits to carry guns for self-defense.

In addition to KHSD, Folsom Cordova School District, Kingsburg Joint Union High School District, and Anderson Union High School District also allow certain staff or teachers or a combination of both to carry guns on campus for self-defense.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.