OPINION:
Teachers in Florida will soon be able to carry arms into classrooms.
And contrary to what the groaners on the left will say, that means Florida is poised to become one of the safest states in the nation for little kids and teens to go to school.
The House voted 65 to 47 in favor of the bill; the Senate, 22 to 17; the governor, Republican Ron DeSantis is poised to sign it into law.
Post-Parkland, the horrific Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that left dead 17 students and staff members, lawmakers pressed forward a bill that gave some officials the ability to bring guns into school buildings. But it also imposed a three-day waiting period on firearms’ purchases and increased legal buying ages of rifles to 21.
This new bill expands on the rights to carry.
Specifically, it allows teachers who are willing to take a 144-hour firearms’ training course and then carry into the classroom.
The naysayers can naysay. (One late-night legislative protest, for instance, focused on what The Washington Post summarized as “an explosive debate on racial bias” of the right-to-carry law). The naysayers, in fact, naysay all the states that allow school officials to bring firearms onto campus to protect students and staffers.
But the fact is: We live in a world where mental illness is rampant, where violence is masked as entertainment, where legal and illegal prescription drug use has resulted in deranged behaviors, where broken homes bring forth dysfunctional kids, where the rotten culture breeds low and no tolerance for absolutes, for rights versus wrongs — where God has been removed from most of the public arena. And one of the consequences of this world has been shootings in schools that have killed and harmed innocents.
The left likes to say the whole problem with school violence stems from the availability of guns.
But this is not a problem of guns.
It’s a problem with hearts and minds and souls.
Until we treat it as such — until we treat the shootings and violence and attacks and killings as the sicknesses of the mind and soul they are — then we’re really only treating symptoms.
When a gun-toting individual with the intent of killing enters a school, it’s too late to treat his or her twisted mind, blackened heart, darkened soul. The only way to fight and save innocents is with a gun.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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