Guns In Schools: House Debates Before Passing Bill

By Victoria Wicks
A law allowing school personnel to carry firearms has moved one step forward. Tuesday the South Dakota House of Representatives passed House Bill 1087, which proposes giving school boards the option of working with local law enforcement officers to put guns in the possession of teachers, administrators, and volunteers.
“If a gunman walks through the door of my kids’ school…”
On the floor of the South Dakota House, Representative Jon Hansen expresses a fear parents have these days, and he echoes a controversial solution.
“…I would certainly hope that there would be somewhere a gun, locked somewhere in a safe, where an administrator or a teacher could get that gun.”
Hansen is a prime sponsor of the bill that will, if it becomes law, allow guns in South Dakota schools.
Hansen says an armed presence is just one piece of a larger response by schools that need to prepare for the eventuality of an armed intruder.
Betty Olson agrees. She’s a state representative and Harding County substitute teacher.
“I have a concealed weapon and I have had it since 1973. But I’m not allowed to carry my concealed weapon that I qualified for into the classroom. And I couldn’t protect the kids in my classroom or myself if we had one of these lunatics like they had in Connecticut come in and start shooting up the place,” Olson says.
“A gun-free zone is an open sign to a lunatic to come in and commit mass murder,” says
Representative Stace Nelson, a retired NCIS investigator and Marine Corps veteran. He has taught weaponry, and in his opinion, teachers and administrators can and should be trained to use guns safely.
“I cannot think of a higher trust that can be placed in any man or woman in this great state than that of teaching our children,” Nelson says. “But with that also comes the obligation of being able to protect not only themselves, but our children.”
Bill opponent Lieutenant Colonel Orson Ward is a school board member at Lead-Deadwood School District and has a lengthy military background.
“Every training mission I have participated in has resulted in the accidental killing of one of the good guys,” Ward says.
He says the accidental killing he saw was sometimes just a paintball to the chest, but at other times it was a tragedy on a live-fire range.
Ward cautions that shooting a paper target doesn’t prepare teachers and administrators for a gunfight in the classroom.
“A school filled with young people is an unforgiving environment, where a miss will prove harmful or even deadlier to innocents,” he says. “You cannot miss.”
Ward’s voice of experience is echoed by New Underwood superintendent Jeff Marlette, who retired at the rank of Brigadier General: “You can look at any incident, whether it be military or civilian—if you really look at it, how many shots are fired, how many shots hit the intended target, and where did those shots go? In a room full of children, in a hall full of children, what happens when that hits a fourth grader?”
Opponents to the bill don’t just disagree with the idea of arming school personnel. They also object that school boards are allowed to make that decision in closed sessions.
House Education chairwoman Jacqueline Sly says secret deliberations are necessary. If details of security are made public, they lose their force.
“If a school board has a sentinel program, it would be conducted in executive session or closed meeting, and that there wouldn’t be any printed materials or records, and that would be just like any other organization where they’re planning what their safety plan would be when you’re looking at security,” Sly says.
But one of the attorneys on the committee disagrees. Representative Timothy Johns says that section of the law does not pass muster.
“I believe that the open meeting law would supersede this, as far as the actual decision to have a sentinel program in your school system,” Johns says. “Besides that, you’re going to have to have minutes. The insurance company’s going to need to know about it. You just can’t keep it totally secret.”
Insurance coverage is a sticking point for Representative Paula Hawks.
“At the top of my concerns is, has anybody talked to liability insurance companies to determine whether schools will even be able to obtain liability insurance for having guns in their school, and then even if they can obtain it, how they will afford to pay for that liability insurance,” Hawks says.
“I have not had one school official, one parent, approach me and say this is a good bill,” says Representative Scott Parsley. He is one of the legislators who say the feedback they’ve received from their constituents is overwhelmingly against the sentinel proposal.
“For me it comes down to something that I think we haven’t talked about at all, and that is you can’t solve violence with violence,” he says. “And I truly believe that this is a step in the wrong direction for us to go, to show our kids that the way we’re going to solve all of our problems is we’re going to arm ourselves.”
The bill passed through the House of Representatives with a vote of 42 to 27. It now goes to the Senate side, where the Judiciary committee will take testimony and decide whether to pass it along to the full Senate.
If it passes there, and if Governor Dennis Daugaard signs it, it becomes law.