While Democrats and gun control activists claim gun control laws will decrease school shootings, the Texas Legislature is taking the opposite approach.
The Texas House of Representatives passed legislation that would incentivize teachers to receive firearms training and carry a gun in the classroom for defense.
How much the incentive?
$25,000!
JUST IN – The Texas House of Representatives passed a bill requiring armed security in all schools. The bill would also give an extra stipend of $25,000 to teachers/guardians who carry inside of schools on a regular basis.
Do you support this bill?
— The Trump Train 🚂🇺🇸 (@The_Trump_Train) April 26, 2023
The Texas House passed a bill last week that would pay an extra $25,000 to K-12 teachers who get training and carry a gun during school hours for classroom defense. https://t.co/N1OhNmTFFs
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 1, 2023
The legislation would provide school employees with a $25,000 stipend per school year to be trained to carry a weapon on K-12 campuses and buses.
The bill, called the “School Sentinel” program, “would also require training on ‘mental health first aid’ and trauma-informed care,” K-12 Dive noted.
K-12 Dive wrote:
- The bipartisan measure passed the state’s House of Representatives Tuesday in an overwhelming 125-21 vote, about a month shy of the one-year anniversary of the Robb Elementary School massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, last May.
- Currently, Texas allows the arming of teachers through its voluntary school marshal program, which passed in 2013 following the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting in Connecticut a year prior. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which oversees the program, increased the number of training opportunities for that program in the months following the tragedy at Robb Elementary.
With the voluntary program, armed teachers are reportedly referred to as “guardians.”
The new legislation seeks to incentive additional teachers to become guardians and be trained to defend schools in times of emergency.
From Breitbart:
Until now, “fewer than 400 teachers have signed up to be guardians.” The goal with HB 13 is to reward teachers who volunteer to be armed for school safety.
State Rep. James Talarico (D) criticized HB 13, saying, “Even teachers who don’t want to carry guns may feel like they are financially pressured to do so just so they can provide for their families.”
On December 13, 2018, Breitbart News observed the commission that investigated Florida’s February 14, 2018, Parkland high school shooting voted 13-1 to in favor of arming teachers.
The news of the commission’s vote came just under a month after Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, head of the Parkland investigatory commission and a one-time opponent of arming teachers, admitted that studying the attack on the school had forced him to change his stance on arming teachers.
On November 21, 2018, Breitbart News reported Gualtieri saying, “People need to keep an open mind to it as the reality is that if someone else in that school had a gun it could have saved kids’ lives.”
Read Texas HB 13 HERE.
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