A school district in Ohio says it plans to try and respond to America’s wave of school shootings by taking advantage of a new law allowing trained teachers and staff to be armed.
River Valley Local School District in Caledonia will permit its four facilities to have teachers armed after proper training, one of 23 in the state that’s taking advantage of a law signed by Governor Mike DeWine in 2022.
Superintendent Adam Wickham said he won’t permit his students and staff to be left unprotected.
Adam Wickham said that their schools will no longer be soft targets and unprotected, and said that most active shooter events occur in areas of gun-free zones or with minimal safety measures in place, and they want to ensure their schools won’t be soft targets.
Adam Wickham highlighted the need for safe gun use in response to a possible shooter in rural Caledonia, which has a population of only 560.
Adam Wickham told a newspaper outlet that as a rural community, response times can often be minutes away in the event of an active shooter, and said the use of armed staff in their buildings could potentially save lives by providing a more immediate response to the threat.
He specifically mentioned shootings in recent years in Nashville, Ulvalde and Parkland where several children and educators were killed.
He said they clearly show that the quicker the response time, the more likely they are to potentially save lives.
In addition to potentially armed staff, the local sheriff’s office will have an armed staff member and a school resource officer at the high school, middle school and two elementary schools in town.
Wickham said that some have expressed questions about the training and selection process.
He said that the vast majority of parents had expressed appreciation for the proactive approach to protecting their children, and that was really the main reason for adopting the use of armed staff.
Wickham knows that not everyone would be in acceptance of this but that every safety measure was taken at River Valley, including the use of armed attendants, which has been put in place to try and ensure their staff and students can go home safely to their families and loved ones each and every day.
DeWine signed House Bill 99 allowing teachers to be armed with 24 hours of training despite Democrats debating the proposal, which is optional for schools and sends the wrong message.
People act like guns are the problem, guns aren’t the problem, people with guns are the problem. I can understand that people want to safeguard themselves, but this is a slippery slope.
Do these guys really believe that the solution to school shootings is to have more firearms in schools?
What are we teaching our children if they see guns around? It just teaches them that having a firearm is acceptable and that firing it is permissible.
They are just too many guns, millions in circulation in the US, so prohibiting future sales would be pointless. If you live in the US or are even visiting you just have to accept that gun brutality is characteristic of the American way.
To be fair, if I was a teacher, I would quit because I wouldn’t be there for a gunfight at the OK corral, I would be there to teach. A well-trained police officer can miss when discharging their gun, so how can a fully trained teacher shoot better with little experience who isn’t a professional – this will lead to disaster.
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