Rob Schneider, actor and political commentator, praised Gov. Greg Abbott for signing a bill requiring armed security at all Texas schools. At the same time, he castigated President Joe Biden for hiring 87,000 IRS agents "to harass small business owners."
"Unlike the Biden Administration which just hired 87,000 IRS Agents to harass small business owners, Gov. Greg Abbott signs new law mandating armed security at all Texas schools," Schneider wrote in a June 17 Twitter post.
HB 3, signed by Abbott last week, requires all public schools in the state to have at least one armed security officer or armed school personnel at each public school campus. It also gives the state more power to compel school districts to create active-shooter plans and practice implementing them. The law provides for an expenditure of $330 million for security centers on school campuses, KSAT.com reported.
The Texas Tribune said the requirement for an armed security officer was the most hotly debated part of the bill, which also provides funds for hardening of school campuses against intruders. The state Senate had removed it, but it was put back into the bill in negotiations with the House. The armed person can be any of these personnel: a peace officer, a school resource officer, a school marshal or a school district employee, the law says. “The bill comes in response to the Uvalde school shooting last year that left 19 children and two adults dead,” the Texas Tribune said.
With the provision for armed security included, the bill passed the House by a big margin, 93-49, the Tribune reported. The state would give each school district $15,000 per campus plus $10 per student to harden campuses. Also, lawmakers have allocated $1.1 billion to the Texas Education Agency for school safety grants to the state’s more than 1,000 school districts, the Tribune news story said.
Opponents of the armed-officer requirement put forth the ultimately losing argument that fewer guns, not more, is the answer to school shootings. In a commentary in the San Antonio Express-News, Paige Duggins-Clay wrote that school armed security has not been shown to prevent school violence. She cited a 2021 study published by the Washington, D.C-based National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, which concluded after studying 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019 that “armed guards were not associated with significant reduction in rates of injuries; in fact ... the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present.“
Another concern is the cost to local school districts. Although the state is providing funding for school safety requirements, “some people are wondering whether some schools will have to dip into their own locally generated revenue to keep the burden of funding an additional salary from falling on schools and local taxpayers,” the KSAT.com news story said. The cost of an armed security guard per school campus could be up to $100,000, according to the Intercultural Development Research Center, the KSAT.com news report said.
