HARRISBURG – PennLive is reporting… School employees with a license to carry a firearm would be permitted to carry a weapon at work under legislation introduced on late last week by state senator and Republican gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano. The Franklin County senator stated in a memo to his Senate colleagues that his desire to allow school employees who want to be armed to carry firearm in schools, arose in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students and two teachers dead. “Mass murderers are often attracted to ‘soft targets’ where they know victims are not armed,” Mastriano said in a statement released on Friday.
Citing data from gun rights advocate John R. Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center, he said, “there has not been a single mass shooting in a school where staff were permitted to carry a firearm.” If enacted, Pennsylvania would join 29 other states that allow teachers to carry firearms, including Ohio, which enacted its law in June. Mastriano’s bill, Senate Bill 1288, would require school employees who want to possess a firearm in the course of their duties to have completed an in-person firearm training. The course would last between 15 and 30 hours and must include training on such topics as interactions with first responders, safe handling and storage of weapons and tactics for denying intruders entry to a classroom.
The employee also must be certified as proficient with the firearm to be able to carry it on school grounds. The bill also would require the school to issue a school safety certificate and provide the name and a full-face photo of those certified employees every year that could be shared upon request with state police or local police with jurisdiction over the school. “This will allow law enforcement to know who is certified to carry should they need to enter the building in an active shooter situation,” Mastriano said.
His bill would not mandate schools or their employees to carry a firearm “but would give school staff the ability to be a last line of defense if they choose to go through the certification process,” he said. “Sadly, there are some who think they shouldn’t have that choice such as the leadership of the Pennsylvania State Education Association,” Mastriano said. “They believe that even if a school employee has been trained, permitted, and certified, that employee should not have the ability to defend students in a worse-case life and death scenario.”
