Gov. Mike DeWine has signed House Bill 99, allowing teachers and other school personnel to carry guns in the classroom, he announced Monday.
Speaking at Ohio Department of Public Safety headquarters in Columbus, DeWine and legislators backing the bill touted the measure as improving school safety and emphasized that it’s accompanied by further resources for youth mental health.
The bill will take effect in 90 days. It includes $6 million to expand the state’s network of school safety centers, DeWine said.
Early in the afternoon Nan Whaley, former mayor of Dayton and now the Democratic nominee running against DeWine for the governor’s office, held a virtual news conference to denounce HB 99 and other loosening of gun laws under DeWine. Whaley recalled that when DeWine visited Dayton immediately after the mass shooting in the Oregon District in August 2019, the crowd began chanting “Do something!” at him.
“It is one of the most powerful moments I have ever witnessed,” Whaley said.
In the aftermath, DeWine backed some gun control measures, but soon caved to political pressure and now claims to be doing what was asked, she said.
“It’s a complete bastardization of what people in Dayton said, frankly,” Whaley said.
DeWine’s announcement came the same day permitless concealed carry of handguns became legal under HB 215, which he signed March 14. Although his announcement on HB 99 was expected, DeWine prefaced it by listing related actions since he became Ohio attorney general in 2011: updating school safety plans, creating a task force focused on mental health and providing grants for schools to give active-shooter training. As governor, he put $84 million toward expanding behavioral health centers in children’s hospitals, DeWine said.
“That is a work in progress,” he said.
Student Wellness and Success Funds are now part of the standard school funding formula, DeWine said. In 2019, the state created the Ohio School Safety Center, which looks for threats on social media, runs the state tipline for potential school violence and offers vulnerability assessments of school facilities, he said.
Another $5 million for the center’s grant program was announced just before the May 24 shooting that killed 21 at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. DeWine said he’ll sign the state’s biannual capital project budget Tuesday, which includes $100 million that can be used to improve school safety. By March 2023, every school must have a team in place to assess students’ behavior for potential threats; teachers will be trained by staff from educational service centers, he said.
For a decade, Ohio law allowed three categories of people to carry guns in schools, DeWine said: police, hired security, or “any other person who has written authorization from the board of education or governing body of a school to convey deadly weapons.” But the Ohio Supreme Court ruled last year that those armed personnel had to have the same training as a police officer: more than 700 hours, or 20 years of law enforcement experience, he said.
That made it “impractical for most schools” to arm anyone but actual police, whether active or retired, DeWine said.
He worked with the General Assembly to craft HB 99 in response to that ruling. Schools will not be required to arm teachers or staff. Some districts have already said they won’t, some said they will, and many are undecided, DeWine said. Districts that already have police on hand may “very, very understandably” want to limit guns to those officers, he said.
The bill says teachers are required to have “up to” 24 hours of gun training, and DeWine said he’s directing the Ohio School Safety Center to develop curriculum for that maximum. Individual districts may insist their personnel get more training, and DeWine said he’s also asking the center to develop “above and beyond” training blocks for that purpose, plus a required 8 hours of extra training per year.
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So just where will all these majority-women teachers keep these guns while in school? Leg/skirt holsters hidden in their clothing, or left on the teacher’s desk or in her drawer, or purse absent mindedly left for some kid to find and play with? Will they be trigger-locked or left open for a quick draw? Will they be pulled out, then not trigger pulled in a moment of panic, never having killed another human before? These are questions that all have to be answered before teachers are allowed to carry them to class. Too many weak women can be easily overpowered and disarmed by emotionally upset young males who otherwise would never be given access to a gun with live ammo to create dead people. Maybe we should be hiring more men teachers and get the ratio closer to 50/50. More American testosterone in the Teacher’s unions and classrooms could prove to be a good thing.
Sounds like you don’t have much use for women. Yes, there are women who couldn’t handle it but there are men too. Remember the FBI agent who left his gun in the restroom? Rumor is he was the same one who shot Ashli Babbitt. That guy is still carrying for the FBI.
Never, ever underestimate the power of a mama bear to protect her children or her husband for that matter. Have you heard of Sarah Palin? She’s not the only woman who can handle a gun.
It wouldn’t be the weak women who would sign up to carry a gun. It would be the mama bears, the women like my 5th grade teacher. She didn’t take anything off anyone and neither did my mother. She could outshoot my father any day of the week and she worked in a school. It might be that harridan running the lunchroom who is strapped and controlling the hall or the female janitor pushing her broom. I have been blessed to know strong women.
You want male teachers? There will be male teachers and staff carrying, as well. There are many good ones but not all. Remember Pajama Boy and metro-sexuals? Would they be better?
I would hope that each teacher would be evaluated individually. I think there will be more men who volunteer in the average school than women but there are females working in schools who would take out a school shooter in a heartbeat. I know of a woman who did just that in a church a few years ago. She nailed him, no muss, no fuss and the taxpayers aren’t paying his bills.
I have no use for women being assigned to do jobs that only men are capable of. Most of the male teachers that taught my generation were fresh out of WWII, many ex-DI Drill sergeants. Many had closets full of arms captured from the Japanese and Germans that were never used on or by kids. The very first day of school these guys would target the prime offending students for a grab and smash against the lockers with a warning of pain to come if the post pubescent boys did not man up and behave like men instead of entitled loudmouth cut and run Vandals. School shootings did not exist, nor were police needed to turn the schools into armed prisons. Those derelict body slams into the lockers in front of the entire student bodies sent a message as to who controlled the turf, and probably saved a lot of these young men from killing or getting killed later. Many I grew up with were sons of Chicago mafia made men whose sons, thanks to the men who ran the schools, turned out to become law abiding successful businessmen. You are right to say women can shoot sometimes even better than men and guns are are great equalizers, but would never make it trying to wrestle a teenage boy on excitement hormones up against a locker for some man-on-man discipline. Your way accepts defeat and assumes we will always have to deal with less than made men raised by emotional drained single moms. Mine created an atmosphere of peace where the male violence got channeled into sports not shooting.
“I have no use for women”
You could have stopped right there. That’s exactly the attitude I pointed out in your other post. Furthermore, we can’t live in the past anymore than we can live in the fantasy world of the left.
It’s today’s men and women that we must depend on to defend our schools and it has to be done in today’s world by anyone trained and willing to do it. We have many retired police, many retired military and some teachers in the classroom who are capable. We need those against them to get out of the way so that capable people, male or female, can defend the kids.
What DeWine did here doesn’t go far enough but it’s better than nothing. I hope more governors will join in.
In.. When i was active duty, some of our BETTER SHOOTERS (those with the higher marks) WERE women..
Leonidas,,,The past is prologue Leo and if it works its good no matter how old the precepts. Your comment “I have no use for women” stop there??? is half the cogent statement and your pursuit of the half truths you believe in and attempt to propagate as beliefs of others is more a Democrat debate tactic of emotional appeal that when you cannot win the argument, just attack the person. Trump would eat your lunch in debate as you hide within the socialist herds of emotional women., many dressed as men. One of my closest life-long friends is a kindergarten teacher with a masters degree in education who just laughed when she saw your post, then related the incident in her class where a father abandoned 5 year old boy brought a loaded gun into her classroom in his back pack. Sorry, but this would never have happened in the 50s and 60s when men were men and American eagles gathered about the schools, not emotional sheep. She also related the extreme pressure never to mention the word God in classroom from the educators who run things. They do it anyway. It is your ideas that men and women are equal in all things that is fantasy world,,,,,there are just some things women do better than men and vice versa. Believing otherwise will just get more people killed. There are points of your view I would like to believe in,,,then reality shows they are not.
Why 90 days? Why not NOW? Why not last year?
Good for dewine..