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For the heck of it, let’s assume a state law allowing school staff to pack heat is a good idea. Good luck finding evidence that a plethora of concealed pistols would improve school safety, but let’s assume the proof exists.
It’s not a hypothetical. The Pennsylvania senate education committee voted 9-3 to move a bill along, toward a full senate vote. It would make it legal for school employees properly trained in the use of firearms to be armed on campus.
Even if it is a good idea — and there are potent arguments it is not — questions abound.
For starters, what’s the point? Gov. Tom Wolf has already said he’s unlikely to sign such a bill, making it almost certainly an exercise in symbolism without substance. It’s easy to vote for a bill you know faces a veto, just ask all the U.S. representatives who spent six years voting some 60 times to repeal, defund or otherwise derail the Affordable Care Act knowing full well it would be vetoed. When a Republican became president, they couldn’t muster the votes.
Funny how votes can change when they have real world consequences.
Then there’s the laziness of the bill, the notion that these senators feel something has to be done to make schools safer, but rather than find money to improve security features in buildings and maybe hire more School Resource Officers, let’s just let teachers carry guns. Looks like you did something without spending a dime.
And there is the conflicting messages to students: Bring a gun to school, you get expelled. See your teacher with a gun? Heck, feel safer.
But the biggest question about this bill is how it can get any traction in a legislature that refuses to honestly grapple with big issues in education that have been around for years?
• Harrisburg has blown a lot of hot air about pension reform, but taken scant action as school boards face skyrocketing pension payments into a system they do not control. It was the state legislature, after all, that quietly voted to increase pensions some 16 years ago and helped create this crisis.
• During former Gov. Tom Corbett’s one-term tenure, Harrisburg choked off funding for school construction and renovation projects, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in limbo and leaving districts wondering if they could afford to make needed upgrades — including for security. The mess has slowly begun to untangle under Gov. Tom Wolf, but a real fix to the construction reimbursement system known as PlanCon has yet to materialize.
• Even when the legislature did take substantive action by approving a new school funding formula, it applied the formula only to a small fraction of total state education spending, leaving intact what is widely regarded as one of the most inequitable state public education funding systems in the country. Per-pupil spending in Pennsylvania’s 500 districts ranges from less than $9,000 to more than $26,000.
But by all means, put more guns in schools. That’ll fix everything.
— Times Leader