New Bill Would Give NC Teachers Raise for Training, Arming Themselves in School

RALEIGH – The most effective solution to a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun; especially when the bad guy isn’t sure who will be armed when considering a target. Republican state lawmakers are following that logic with the introduction of Senate Bill 192, the School Security Act of 2019, which will offer North Carolina teachers a five percent raise for completing training and arming themselves in school.

The same bill was filed last year, but ultimately died in committee. A new sponsor of the legislation, Sen. Jerry Tillman (R-Randolph), says that the mood has changed and that offering teachers the ability to be trained and carry a gun will find more success on Jones Street this year.

Of course, Democrats over at the wannabe union N.C. Association of Educators (NCAE) are coming out hard against the measure. Mark Jewell, who regularly pushes purely Leftist policies in his role at the NCAE, calls the policy a “disaster waiting to happen,” and would rather the lawmakers “arm teachers with the resources they need to teach our kids to be safe.”

No amount of ‘resources’ are going to keep our kids safe from an armed attacker. However, an armed teacher standing guard for a classroom full of students would certainly make them safer than otherwise. In recent school shootings, harrowing stories of teachers throwing themselves between the gunman and their students are common. At Sandy Hook Elementary School, the principle literally ran at the gunman, unarmed, to slow him down and sacrificed her life.

Consider, for a moment, how differently these situations may have turned out if there were even one armed teacher whose identity was unknown to the attacker.

To be sure, the concern over introducing guns to schools is not altogether unwarranted, but the concerns should be followed to their logical conclusion with all of the information taken into consideration.

For one, this bill would not be arming teachers indiscriminately. To the contrary, it would be a a voluntary program in which interested teachers would be required to complete the same firearms training that law enforcement officers are subject to.

There are a lot of hysterical reactions to the bill, common among them is that secretly armed (and trained) teachers will only increase the chance of gun violence at school. The ‘more guns = more violence’ narrative, though, has been proven false time and again. Nationwide gun violence rates have been dropping precipitously while gun ownership has been climbing considerably.

We’ll see if the Republican majorities have the gumption to see this bill through, or if the Left’s narrative will again win the day. I don’t know about you, but, even though I know such violence to be rare, I would feel much more comfortable knowing that my kids have the added benefit of a trained and armed protector in the event that some nut job decides to shoot up a school. It would also stand to reason that would be attackers may think twice if they know any number of teachers could be armed.

You can follow the votes on the bill in the state legislature here.