Last year, to great fanfare, the South Dakota Legislature passed the school gunslinger law, allowing schools to arm teachers, janitors, and volunteers to protect students from imminent doom. School administrators have called it a stupid, hairbrained idea, and none that I know of signed on to subject their students to the increased danger of more guns in school. Legislators nonetheless assured us they were giving us the gift of school gunslingers to demonstrate their concern for the safety of students.
This week the House Appropriations Committee took up House Bill 1124, which would have spent real money to promote school safety. The District 31 delegation—Reps. Johns and Romkema and Sen. Ewing—and some colleagues wanted to spend five million dollars to hire and retain school resource officers, cover security training and equipment for schools, and hire additional counselors and mental health specialists. Those proposals seem like practical ways to make all students safer without introducing more risk of accidental shootings in schools.
Alas, these solutions carry that five-million-dollar price tag, and House Appropriations said no. Three of the naysayers—Reps. Bolin, Don Haggar, and Mickelson—voted for the school gunslinger bill last year.
The school gunslinger bill didn't require the Legislature to spend any money to promote school safety. Ask the Legislature to invest real money in schools, and the eagerness to vote aye disappears.
p.s.: Rep. Wismer did pitch a hoghouse amendment to turn the safety proposal into a simple emergency disbursement of $5 million to the K-12 schools for regular expenses. her colleagues voted that down, too.
Related: David Lias writes about how the Vermillion School District is struggling against South Dakota's overall stinginess toward public education.
Perhaps the biggest surprise about frustrations with a red state legislature is that people are still surprised by the actions coming from it.
The next blizzards, ice storms, tornadoes, flooding and plagues of locusts can't come soon enough.
You may need a tetanus shot for this irony.. After passing the "Sentinel" bill last year because legislators understood gun free zones are not safe, many of those that supported the bill indicated that THEY were not qualified to carry concealed in our gun free zone state capitol: http://legis.sd.gov/Legislative_Session/Bills/Bill.aspx?Bill=1066&Session=2014
Listed to the full debate..
So the interpretation would be that legislators behave like carnival barkers to promote the gunslingers and the 2nd Amendment, but when it comes to actually spending real money to protect South Dakota's children it is no longer a good option.
Money before children, that makes sense.
There are a large number of insurance companies in SoDak,what are the chances they'd underwrite liability insurance for schools that allow armed guards. I've noticed the companies in iowa won't take the risk.
You can always tell the rank amateurs from people who know what they are talking about. HB 1124 obviously had input from people who knew something about school security, but that explains why it got turned down.
No, oh, no! People who are actually competent in solving a problem with rational legislation? Can't have that in South Dakota.
In my opinion,there is no need to have anyone in South Dakota schools to be armed. What would the consequences be if an innocent child were to be accidentally harmed by a school "sentinel?" If SD school(s) would be locked down during school hour,would that not decrease the chance of some bozo entering the premises to cause harm? I a student tries to go "postal" at school,wouldn't it make more sense for staff to have panic buttons to push that would summon police at the first sign of a student(s) acting hostile?
Food for thought.......
This was a piece meal legislation designed to bring back dueling among legislators when their honor was brought into question.
We all know that legislators would never lose their cool under extreme duress in the capital, they are above that you know.