Arizona AG Tom Horne Proposes Arming One Educator Per School
Horne Proposes Arming 1 Educator Per School
Arizona’s attorney general wants to arm school principals.
Tom Horne says he has found the “golden mean” between allowing all teachers to carry firearms and exposing children to tragedies like the school shooting in Connecticut. He is proposing that only the principal or one other staff member at each school be trained and then allowed to carry a firearm at school.
“Some have proposed teachers bringing guns to school, but I think that would create more danger than it would solve,” Horne said. “But if we did nothing, we might regret it if another incident occurs that might have been prevented.”
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Horne, who formerly served as the state’s superintendent of public instruction, said the ideal solution to gun violence in schools would be to have an armed, school resource officer in every school. But he said budget constraints make that a challenge. School resource officers are trained law enforcement officers. The state in recent years cut funding for the SRO program.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, Mohave County Sheriff Tom Sheahan and Apache County Sheriff Joe Dedman do support the proposal.
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Horne said he came up with the idea over the holidays. He said he doesn’t know of any other state with a similar program.
‘As far as I know, it’ s a new idea,’ he said. ‘It’s an original Tom Horne idea.’
The Arizona Legislature in recent years has gained a reputation for loosening state gun restrictions, including passing a law to allow Arizonans to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
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Tom Horne imagines threats where there are none, and fails to recognize the danger in his proposal. He was a key player in getting Mexican American Studies [MAS] banned from the Tucson school district because he thought they were promoting dangerous ideas. He said MAS needed to be destroyed as Carthage was destroyed. He had text books used in the MAS program banned because they were dangerous, claiming that one of them called upon Chicanos to ‘kill the gringo’.
But he thinks more guns would make schools safer. Arizona allows concealed guns to be carried without a permit. He says nothing about the dangers of that.
You can read more about Tom Horne and the Tucson School district here. You can read about his personal legal problems, and see a better photo of him, here.