In a first, the state has purchased shoot houses designed for indoor gun training to help school staff ‘respond to active shooter’
Ohio appears to be the first state to purchase shoot houses – mobile homes designed for indoor firearms training – to better prepare public school staff “to respond to an active shooter”.
The Ohio Controlling Board, which helps oversee changes to the state budget, approved public safety officials’ request for $78,028 last month to purchase two shoot houses to help train public school employees that are allowed to carry firearms at work.
“Currently, we have movable canvas walls that can be configured to simulate responding to an active shooter in a school, like walking down a hallway, but there are limits,” said Jay Carey, a spokesperson for the Ohio department of public safety. “The more realistic we can make the training, the better prepared armed school staff will be to respond to an active shooter.”
I have asked advocates of this several times exactly how it can be ensured that a student would never be able to get access to a teacher’s gun. The best I get are various versions of “well they just won’t.”
I also like to ask if they ever had a teacher with a really bad temper who might have been tempted to use a gun in a moment of blind rage if they had one available.
Because I sure did.
It’s not hard to find instances of SROs misplacing their firearms. Now we’ll add more guns with less training. Surely nothing will go wrong.
Just a month or so ago, the one in my daughter’s former middle school left his on the bathroom sink and a kid found it. Thankfully, the kid did the responsible thing and reported it to the office. One of the many reasons I’m glad we got her out of that hellhole.
Oddly I had a music teacher like that.
My middle school band teacher was a bitter alcoholic. He was one of the top jazz trombonists in the country, but ended up teaching middle school band due to the alcoholism. I don’t know if he would ever have used a gun, but I don’t particularly want drunk teachers having access to them. And he was not the only teacher I had who showed up to school drunk. My drama teacher only got fired for it because she got near-blackout drunk and stumbled past the office.
That’s just crazy. I could imagine having a drunk teacher.