The “teachers packin’ heat” bill is advancing in Florida.
As if on cue, reason number 45,238 why this is a terrible idea.
Yikes. This demonstrates not only the need for mental health services but better vetting of teachers.
Not just teachers, but anyone seeking to purchase a gun.
Per the NYT podcast that Frink recommended, determinations of mental illness sufficient to forbid gun ownership are difficult to obtain.
“Vetting” should not be limited to mental health considerations, let alone extremely rare cases of mental illness. There’s a lot of room for improvement here.
I don’t know what vetting is involved in becoming a teacher, but it should extend beyond mental health.
Certainly giving someone the ability to teach kids geography warrants less scrutiny than giving them the ability to kill all of them. But that doesn’t mean no scrutiny.
Even without a gun this guy shouldn’t be in a classroom.
That would demote him to “crazy guy with a gun outside the school”. Or “crazy janitor with a gun inside the school” for that matter.
Vet all school employees! That’s the point. Make the schools safe. It’s about mitigation, as one says.
Yes, that would demote all of them to “crazy guy with a gun outside the school”. Risk mitigated!
I’m saying we should keep the crazies out of school employment.
I understand. I was just expanding on that, on the grounds that children’s safety shouldn’t stop at the school boundaries, and that it’s also possible to protect kids from armed school employees who manage to pass an employment vetting regimen.
As TM2YC suggests, we can’t stop bad things from happening. I don’t recall hearing a story about a teacher bringing a gun to school and shooting a student. That would be weird if such a thing were vanishingly rare even with the ready access to guns.
Sure, but if you can get rid of a rare but bad thing without downsides, I say go for it.
Not all crazy people who pose a danger to children carry weapons.
And thankfully so! The more people who pose a danger to children we can put into that category (not carrying weapons), the better. That’s harm reduction at work.
The question is how you do that without violating law abiding people’s rights.
You’re not law-abiding if you still have a gun after it’s been made illegal. Circular, yes, but all laws are like this. Law-abiding murderers became criminals when murder was outlawed, unless they stopped doing it.
We have to hear more about this case to know if there was a basis for denying the right to a handgun.
As always, I’m approaching it from the opposite direction. We have to hear more about this case to know if there was a basis for justifying the presence of a handgun in a classroom.
I suspect we’re both a default “No” on our questions, with a fairly high hurdle to get to “Yes”.
I don’t think there’s any justification for the handgun in the classroom. As to whether the teacher should own one (assuming he legally owns/is licensed), we need to know more. Setting the 2nd Amendment aside, requiring people to provide justification for firearm ownership runs headlong into due process and equal protection issues. I’m not sure how that shakes out but it’s a legal issue that would need to be addressed.
I ran the due process/equal protection argument past the DMV but they still wouldn’t give me a license until I passed the test.
A test may pass master. But if instead there’s a “good enough reason” standard (or as Australia says, a “genuine reason”), then we may run into issues. Consider if you needed to demonstrate a “genuine reason” to obtain a driver’s license and DMV bureaucrat decided your reason wasn’t lacking. In that situation I think there’s a good case for a due process violation.