US to help arm school staff
Employees to receive weapons training in controversial move
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s administration will step up aid to states that want to arm school employees under a plan to increase campus safety, officials said.
The controversial idea to put weapons in schools, which has drawn little support from educators, is part of a “pragmatic plan to dramatically increase school safety and to take steps to do so right away”, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a conference call with reporters on Sunday.
“We are committed to working quickly because there’s no time to waste,” said DeVos, who will chair a federal commission on school safety.
Among other measures, the Trump administration is urging states to pass temporary “risk protection orders” as Florida recently did, with technical assistance from Washington, said Andrew Bremberg, a presidential assistant who heads the Domestic Policy Council.
These courtissued orders allow for law enforcement officers to remove guns from people who pose a demonstrated threat “to temporarily prevent such individuals from purchasing new firearms, all while still protecting due process rights”, Bremberg said.
“The administration will be working with states to provide rigorous firearms training to specifically qualified volunteer school personnel,” he added.
The moves come during a national gun control debate revived by survivors of last month’s massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 14 students and three staff were killed by a man with a semiautomatic rifle.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, on Twitter dismissed the administration’s measures as “baby steps designed not to upset @NRA”, the powerful National Rifle Association gun lobby.
A senior administration official said there were already “a multitude of programmes that exist across the country where school personnel are trained in conjunction with state or local law enforcement”.
The administration is “working with the Department of Justice to continue and increase the amount of help” for such initiatives, the official added.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the largest professional union in the United States, has said parents and educators “overwhelmingly reject the idea of arming school staff ”.
The NRA has long argued for more armed security in US schools, a plan Trump has advocated.
Last Wednesday, Florida legislators approved funding for a programme to allow some teachers and school employees to be armed.
The measure came in a Bill that raises the minimum age to purchase all firearms from 18 to 21, bans modification devices that allow a semiautomatic weapon to fire faster and increases mental health funding.