By NRA-ILA
Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB-7030 within hours after receiving it. SB-7030 contains the language that authorizes local school boards to allow classroom teachers to go through training and carry firearms on school campuses.
News reports suggested that “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” and another Bloomberg group, “Students Demand Action for Gun Sense in America,” were apparently pushing on Governor DeSantis to veto SB-7070 — the wrong bill.
According to News Service Florida, the “Demand” groups delivered a stack of signatures to the Governor’s office urging the Governor to veto a bill that would arm classroom teachers. It further reported that a DeSantis employee was asked by the group to tell the Governor to veto SB-7070 because it expanded the “guardian” program. THAT’S THE WRONG BILL!
Not only is their anti-gun reasoning flawed, their legislative information is wrong. SB-7070 is the K-12 Education Bill.
We are pleased that Governor DeSantis signed SB-7030.
When seconds matter, law enforcement is often minutes away. That’s why the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission, Chaired by Sheriff Bob Gualtiere, recommended to the legislature that they pass legislation to allow classroom teachers to be armed.
BACKGROUND:
SB-7030 Implementation of Legislative Recommendations of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission – Requires sheriffs to establish a school guardian program; requires the Office of Safe Schools to annually provide training for specified personnel teachers; requires district school boards and school district superintendents to partner with security agencies to establish or assign safe-school officers; revises requirements for school district zero-tolerance policies; provides standards and training for classroom teachers who choose to go through training in order to be armed at school.
The vote in the House was 65 – 47 with five (5) Republicans voting AGAINST the bill. The five are all newly elected freshmen. They are: Vance Aloupis (R-Miami), Mike Beltran (R-Valrico), Mike Caruso (R-Boca Raton), Chip LaMarca (R-Lighthouse Point) and David Smith (R-Winter Springs).
The Senate vote was 22-17 with Sen. Anitere Flores voting against it (along with the Democrats).
Great work, guys! May these guns go unneeded, but ready, nonetheless.
They shouldn’t allow the local school board the veto power. It should be a state program and school boards should not be required to approve it. All the liberal areas like broward will say no.
A CC license should be all that is required, school board should not have a veto either in the school or in the local Wendy’s, or anywhere else. Unless they can show the source of the expertise which makes them so special.
Doesn’t this require something like a week of non-stop training to allow teachers to qualify? I guess it makes it easier to amend to something reasonable next year, but I want to know what politician thought that was a sane number.
Looks like 140 hours in firearms training….
So, just shy of four full time weeks?
That’s more than all my nondeployed training in the army…….. honestly kinda jealous if they can get paid “education” leave for that.
SAFE, that is a real good point. How are full time teachers supposed to find the time to take 140 hours of totally useless “training”, and who is going to pay for it?
At this very moment, David Hogg is having an attack of acute constipation
By the look of his face, he’s been suffering acute constipation for years. He always looks like he hasn’t had a shit in months.
Good.
“Blood ran in school hallways immediately following the signing ceremony. All the children are dead.”
Vox/Salon article?
One giant leap forward for protecting children and the 2nd amendment.
Not in my County or any of the surrounding Counties in W. Central FL.., All of our school- boards voted against allowing teachers to go into the Guardian program. Tired of relying on ONE retired LEO school resource officer if shtf. Districts should not be allowed to “opt out”.
Okeechobee just voted to allow classroom teachers to join the guardian program.
This would never fly in Filthy Phil Murphy’s NJ schools.
His answer would invariably be “no guns for teachers, but thousands of misappropriated taxpayer dollars for a peer-reviewed, union-supplied bucket of rocks.” Seriously though, you’ll never see school resource officers or teachers doing the job ascribed to law enforcement. Ain’t gonna happen in NJ.
Moms Demand Action. Thanks Gov. Probably not what they were things.
Step, meet right right direction.
“contains the language that authorizes local school boards to allow” is just like when you were a kid and you asked for candy or to go get ice cream later and she responded with “We’ll see.” That means “no, nada, not gonna happen, but here’s some semi-hopeful empty words to make you feel like you’re better off than you were five seconds ago, when really you’re just being played.”
No. It is victory. The current legal system matters. Like it or not, the default has been only bad guys who don’t care about breaking laws, are armed in and around schools.
If not for Heller we’d have been and would continue to see virtual total bans of handguns and anything but break action and bolt action long guns – after applicants prove a need — in states or cities with a Dem majority.
The fact that the Second Amendment prohibition on infringement should matter doesn’t change the fact that it often doesn’t or that only by a single vote on the court ever does.
It’s nice to know moms needing action are opposed to K 12 education. Make them explain that one even though it’s a mistake.
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” 2nd Amendment, U.S. Constitution
The Florida Legislature approached the problem of how to arm teachers and school staff from the wrong direction. They should remove restrictions that enable gun-free zones, remove authority from school boards to punish those who would legally arm themselves to defend themselves and encourage all who are able to carry firearms to do so.
So you expect the Florida legislators to draft legislation that won’t get 20% support in the legislature? And then what?
There are a lot of things which “should” be done, but look at it this way; this moves the decision closer to the parents involved. If my school board, a mile down the street, refuses to allow teachers to be armed, I can spend a noisy hour protesting there every morning until that is changed. I cannot do that at the state legislature. So, while this is not perfect, it is nonetheless a win! If Broward is content with its dead children, that is OK with me, the world is overpopulated!
So now teachers get special privileges the rest of us are denied even if we too have the same training? What special trust or talent do these teachers, who generally are some of the most anti gun people around have that the rest of the population does not? Either training works for everybody or nobody. This is a bunch of crap.
Glad to hear teachers in Florida might have a way to protect themselves from crazies so at the end of the day they can go home to their families and loved ones. We can only wonder how if that hero coach in Parkland had been armed how many lives might have been saved.
Those school districts in Florida who oppose this and will not abide by it can explain to the parents of their murdered children in their school district how this is not a good idea if tragedy comes to one of those schools.
It seems armed teachers and staff could be especially effective like an armed marshal on an airplane in that no one really knows who and how many their are which can be an effective deterrent in itself.
Its still up to the districts to decide if they will allow teacher toncarry. I live in northeast Florida, heavy conservative\republican, red counties and every school district has made public today that they have rejected it including the mayors and sheriffs.
Its a feel good bill that requires 144 hours of training for teachers if they are allowed to carry. This bill was designed to fail. In all of north Florida there must be hundreds of troops to teachers that would only require minimal training.
The guardian program has also failed largely because the “Sheriffs” lose funding for resource officers. Its more political theater, students be damned!!!!
As the most recent shootings in Colorado demonstrate, no amount of gun control aimed at disarming law abiding citizens will do anything to prevent criminals from shooting people. Armed and trained good guys will stop shootings however.
Here we go again.
Yet another POS RHINO in my home town.
Im sorry we have this useless POS as my representative
Im now ashamed to admit I voted for him.
Mike Caruso (R-Boca Raton) this will be his 1st and last term if I can help it,
You obviously don’t know your district which has been going from Republican to Democrat for a long time. Wasn’t Caruso’s election the most razor close in the entire congressional elections?
It is masochistic of you to “make sure” he gets defeated since you will have a Democrat in the pocket of Everytown.
Judging Republican officials who are in purple districts the same as deep red districts is foolish.
Yes I do know.
Ive been here over 45 years. This was a rural area when I moved here. Its now Long Island but hot.
The North Easterners who shit on their original home states . Are now doing the same here. Turning Florida into a shitbox over the past 20 years.
We worked hard to get Caruso elected and yes it was a paper thin margin.
So far he has turned out to be such a RHINO embarrassment. He might as well be a Libitard.
It seems not to matter one wit what party is on office here. Its all in name only.
hurray
theyre finally discontinuing the practice of disarming teachers which has the double effect of violating their human rights and creating gun free zones which create mass shooters in the first place
as more red states do this watch for the trend of school shootings becoming much more of a blue state phenomenon
This program should be mandatory to implement. The teachers to be trained should be only volunteers. Any school not having teachers to volunteer should be required to hire armed security. Any school not complying would have principal, superintendent, school board removed and fined. No gun free zones in state allowed. That would deter free fire zones of mass casualties. Either pass a bill with some teeth in it of don’t pass anything.
Any teacher who fails to “volunteer” should be replaced as soon as an American teacher is available. This would provide a valuable side benefit of removing the hardest core anti gun teachers from any proximity to our children. But we should have a national goal of every person working in a public school being armed, from the janitor to the lunchroom staff. If you are legally prohibited from having a gun, you should not be working in a school.
Funny they all “DEMAND” action so Fl legislature acts and the Gov signs and they are still pissed… This law does not require teachers to carry and several school districts have already opted out as permitted by the law. This thing provides for extensive background checks, psychological evaluation and well over 100 hours of “police” training… So anybody want to place a bet on where the most likely place for the next school shooting in Fl will be? My money (once this program is fully operational) is on a district that has opted out….
It is a worthless bill.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/03/luis-valdes/florida-gop-fast-tracks-another-feel-good-do-nothing-bill/
It throws money at the state’s schools to improve their security, places the schools under some level of oversight, and ostensibly removes the restrictions that currently ban teachers from carrying on school grounds.
It basically makes mandatory many of the provisions that were put in place on a voluntary basis by another Republican-authored bill last year (SB 7026), the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. That was the bill that gave Floridians a state-level bump stock ban, under-21 gun purchase restrictions, and a red flag laws.
Why is SB 7030 a feel-good do-nothing bill? Because it doesn’t change the fact that under SB 7026, certain non-teaching school staff were allowed to carry on school grounds only if two conditions were met; the local school board had to authorize it and teachers had to attend a 132-hour firearms course sponsored by the County Sheriff.
Well, the majority of Florida’s School Boards voted to not allow their staff to carry on their grounds and opted for school resource officers in stead.
There are a total of 67 school boards in Florida and less than 30% of them allow any staff to carry on campus. The majority of the districts that went with the Guardian Program are rural, underpopulated, and underfunded. They can’t afford to have a dedicated school resource officer on duty because the Sheriff’s offices in those counties themselves are underfunded and understaffed.
The major urban districts like Miami Dade or Leon would never allow armed teachers in their schools. The Miami Dade School Board has their own police department. In Leon County (Tallahassee), the board contracts out the school resource officer duties to city of Tallahassee Police Department and Leon County Sheriff’s Office.
If they wanted to actually accomplish something for gun owners, the Republican supermajority-controlled legislature could have instead fast tracked HB 175 or HB 6073, two bills that would have gutted the anti-gun provisions of SB 7026 that were passed after the Parkland shooting. Instead, they’re allowing those bills to languish in committee since House Speaker Jose Oliva is no fan of Second Amendment rights.
Or they could actually just pass campus carry or throw Florida gun owners a bone with permitted open carry. But that won’t happen either since the Senate President is Bill Galvano, the man who authored SB 7026 in the first place.
Instead, the one-time “Gunshine State” continues to slip behind others in the race to expand freedom.
Fall behind others? Any objective measure shows all blue states and all purple states which Florida long has been have been increasing restrictions. The few victories have been in the courts. Trumps judicial appointments are something Everytown and their minions hate.
Utah any permit holder open ore hidet.
Florida sux.
The only good thing to come out of the Florida guardian program is that now state law requires at least one armed person every school in Florida.
Even Broward County and Boca Raton have to follow the law and have an armed school resource officer in every school.
All schools also got more money for fences and other physical security measures.
So even if the school board wants their children completely vulnerable, they still have to have at least one person with a gun in the school.
These are tiny baby steps in the right direction.
We have our work cut out for us here in Florida to get rid of the rhinos like Anitere Flores, Galvano and Caruso. There’s also Brian Mast who is a RINO war amputee against AR 15’s. We have primary them all out and elect conservative Republicans