It’s been in the background for a while; it’s how good legislation is done; H.B. 99 has now passed the general assembly and is headed to Governor DeWine’s desk for signature with a few minor tweaks. And with that signature, Ohio will step into a leadership role in solving the mass shooter problem in public schools. The bill itself was sponsored by Thomas Hall and has become known as the School Safety Bill and will essentially set a roughly 24-hour minimum training limit on allowing teachers and other adults to carry firearms in a public school setting allowing for first responders in the event of mass shootings which are all too frequent these days. Thomas Hall held a press conference for the event on June 2^nd, 2022, once the vote had concluded in the senate the day before, to discuss the details, which started well over a year ago. It had been considered controversial by the same types of people who have left schools so vulnerable to attacks by essentially making them gun-free zones, which isn’t practical these days. While school resource officers are always preferred, we have seen that their effectiveness is not always stable, such as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where official police were unsure how to deal with the crisis. The truth of the matter is that security is best when it is decentralized, as is the case with the general practice of concealed carry. Having public schools gun-free zones or limiting security to institutionalized options have not been successful. H.B. 99 creates a decentralized option that is the key to future gun safety everywhere in America. It was the hard work of Thomas Hall in working with a lot of people in Columbus to make it a possibility. 

The best way to think about the situation is to consider a house cat that has been declawed because the owners of the cat do not want the pet to rip holes in the furniture. But then the owner finds the shedding of hair to be something they don’t want to clean up, so they put the cat outside for convenience. That might cut down on the hair inside the home, and the owner thinks they are doing something nice by still keeping the cat as a pet. But it’s the worst thing to do for the poor creature, the cat. Putting a cat outside without any defense is a death sentence for the declawed cat. Without its ability to defend itself, other more aggressive cats will pounce on the creature without mercy. It won’t take long for the declawed cat to be killed by a rival without an ability to defend itself. Sending a declawed cat outside a protected home environment is irresponsible and vicious. The cat owner first destroyed the creature’s ability to protect itself from other cats for the convenience of life in domestic bliss until it was decided that the owner could change their mind. Sending the creature outside without a means to defend itself allowed the owner to feel morally righteous without acknowledging the hostile nature of cats in general.

In 1990 Congress passed the Gun-Free Zones Act that essentially took guns out of public schools, which was equivalent to declawing a cat and putting it outside. Since that ridiculous law for public schools, gun violence has escalated to levels that nobody finds acceptable. Those who pushed for such a law continue to believe that guns should not be in schools or other government establishments and continue to pursue their efforts without reality attached. Gun-free zones have proven to be a menace to all logic by people who essentially value the furniture of public education more than the benefits of the cat under their care. Public schools have evolved into a platform for progressive institutionalism, and within that worldview, there is a desire to remove guns from society in general. That is just as ridiculous as insisting that outside cats in the world treat each other fairly and not try to kill each other over spilled milk and territory. Yet when that system fails to produce the results that liberal politics desires, a maniac and killer often is born, and the next mass shooting occurs. Thomas Hall has some experience with mass shootings; his father was a school resource officer who stopped a mass shooting in Madison schools a few years ago. So that was a case where the extra security worked in favor of the school. But to be successful, the officer must engage the target. Some paid security have shown a tendency to consider under emergency conditions that life is worth more than the paycheck and fleed the scene. It has happened too often in school shootings not to consider mitigating circumstances. 

The best measure for dealing with school shootings, just as it is witnessed in general society, is to put guns in the hands of adults, educators, and even administrators who are most incentivized to fill the need when a crisis arrives. It makes it much harder for potential shooters to block off their targets when they aren’t sure who security is; it could be anybody in the school. With that simple change in dealing with gun violence, a much safer public-school environment is established. Those against guns in public places, particularly schools, are against guns generally and have ideas that society would be better off without them. That is equivalent to the pet owner who does not regard the nature of wildlife outside the home’s safety, where other cats, raccoons, and coyotes will challenge any house cat with violence and worse at every opportunity they have. Guns and violent people are abundant in the world. Uninventing them and the nature of people who would use them to inflict unnecessary harm to others is not an option. Progressive politics simply aren’t considering the nature of violent human beings who fall through the cracks of their overly institutionalized society. They produce a lot of anxious characters, and by having gun-free zones, they leave lots of opportunities to make victims out of the innocent, all to fill an ideology of political nature that is not conducive to existence in general. H.B. 99 is a remedy to that problem and one of the first in the United States to take such a step forward. And under the current language that the legislature has shaped, Governor DeWine is poised to sign it to make it law. We are presently witnessing a complete degradation of institutionalism in general, specifically with the Biden administration’s problems publicly on all fronts. And the aggressive characters who linger in the world at the edges of sanity have been empowered to act in maniacal ways. Kids cannot be left vulnerable to these failures, so action is needed by our political order and society, in general, to bring real solutions to the matter. Teachers who are willing to take the 24 hours minimum course to carry a gun in the schools and be first responders to the next mass shooting are those most inspired to use those skills in a crisis situation. To be part of a decentralized solution is the best way a teacher can make their classroom environment safer and make it harder for a potential aggressive personality to exploit a weakness that otherwise might provoke them to action. The surest way to inspire that potential for violence is to make the target defenseless, which is what the 1990 Gun-Free Zone Act did. Correcting that mistake is the task of our times and the efforts of great legislation produced by Thomas Hall and the Ohio legislature. 

Rich Hoffman