Teachers at a Texas school have decided to take matters into their own hands when it comes to any potential outside threats their students could face – and many of them may be armed and dangerous.
A new sign posted outside a school in Medina. outside San Antonio, notes that some of the faculty may be carrying firearms, and they are ready to fight if need be.
“Attention,” the sign reads. “Please be aware that the staff at Medina ISD may be armed and will use whatever force is necessary to protect our students.”
Students between the ages of four and 18 attend the school, and the superintendent wants to make sure anybody wishing to harm them knows what they are getting into.
“You never know if there’s a transient or someone who has zeroed in on harming a child,” Superintendent Penny White told a local ABC affiliate.
Ms White said she and the school board had discussed the sign for more than a year before putting it up.
Board member Dr James Lindstrom said that no particular event inspired the sign. It was “the general environment nationally,” he said.
Arming teachers became a major topic of debate following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that took the lives of 20 first-graders and six teachers in December 2012. Proponents of the issue claimed that armed staff could have prevented the deaths.
The National Rifle Association funded a report that was released in 2013 that called for the arming of school personnel as a first line of defence against violent intruders.
“Teachers should teach, but if there is personnel that has interest and is willing to go through 40 to 60 hours of firearms training, then schools should be willing to [arm them],” said former Arkansas representative Asa Hutchinson, who led the School Shield Programme task force in 2013.
A new law in Texas now permits the carry of concealed firearms on college campuses. The so-called “campus carry” law sparked outrage from students, faculty, and staff of the University of Texas at Austin. On the first day of classes at the university, students arrived armed not with guns but with dildos to protest the policy in a campaign “c**cks not glocks”.
But Medina residents do not seem to be particularly bothered by the sign.
“Schools have been a target for, for lack of a better word, crazy people, and I’m perfectly fine with it,” said Jillian Sides, who sends her two sons to the school.
But Alisha Reagan, a mother of a third-grader at the school, feels a bit apprehensive about the sign.
“I don’t know if that’s asking for trouble or not,” she said. “I mean, you post a sign like that, it may bring trouble, unfortunately."
