After the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Florida, a sheriff in Ohio came up with a simple solution to help make schools less vulnerable to those who are hell-bent on disrupting lives by killing innocents: he offered to provide defensive firearm training to teachers.
The anti-gunners probably scoffed at that, thinking it wouldn’t amount to much. But, less than a month after the tragic slaying of more than a dozen students, Sheriff Richard K. Jones has tweeted that his offer has gotten positive results.
“Visited our school personnel CCW class this morning. These folks are excited and thankful! We are DOING, not DEBATING!” he said on Twitter March 3.
That was followed by a successive tweet that spelled out the program’s early reach. “So far, almost 100 school employees have successfully completed the CCW class, at least 50 more are scheduled. Thank you teachers and school staff for your support.”
He summed it up nicely when he said “doing, not debating.” The anti-gunners might be content to talk, and to blame law-abiding gun owners for the actions of a few deranged individuals who want their 15 minutes of fame, but Jones’ program is actually laying the groundwork for preparing people who are on campus to protect the children.
Jones, sheriff of Butler County, was driving less than a week after the Florida shooting, and he was concerned about his daughter. She had come to his house a few days earlier, crying because she said she was scared for the safety of her children. Suddenly, the idea came to him. He pulled off to the side of the road, and made his offer on Twitter. No hard-and-fast plans. Just a spur-of-the-moment idea. And it panned out.
"It wasn’t any phone calls. It wasn’t anyone that lobbied me,” Jones was reported as saying in the Cincinnati Enquirer. “It was my daughter and my grandkids. Simply my daughter coming to my house crying. I ran it past her. As a mother, what does she think? She wants her kids safe.”
By making sure that school employees have the knowledge and ability to fight back should an active shooter ever arise at their school, Jones is taking strides to make it that much more difficult for a potential mass murderer to be successful.
At the very least, it’s a step in the right direction, and it’s far more likely to serve a purpose than to have anti-gunners wring their hands as they try to devise new ways to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves and others.
