By Robert Kittle

(COLUMBIA, SC)

A South Carolina House subcommittee has rejected for this year a bill that would have allowed teachers and other school employees to carry concealed weapons on campus, but the sponsor of the bill says he might file it again next year. Rep. Phillip Lowe, R-Florence, says the goal of the bill is to protect children. “A lot of our schools are still a gun-free zone,” he says. “There is no SRO (School Resource Officer) at all on the property, especially in the very rural areas.”

The teachers or school employees would have to have, or get, concealed weapons permits. They would then get two weeks of specialized training in how to handle active shooter situations, first aid, how to handle pepper spray or mace, and how to de-escalate situations. School districts would have to decide whether to allow their employees to become “school protection officers.”

The subcommittee voted 4-2 against the bill because of law enforcement groups’ concerns about people carrying guns on campus after only two weeks of training. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott says his deputies get about a year of training before they go out and work the streets, and then get updated training every year.

“Teachers are trained to teach. I’m trained to be a law enforcement officer. Administrators train to be administrators. When you start crossing those, then that’s going to cause issues and I think it probably would cause more problems and more of a danger than it would be in preventing something,” he says. “If there was a serious situation in a school, you’ve got to be really trained to address it.”

Rep. Lowe says if an insane person was thinking about going to a school to shoot people, the fact that he wouldn’t know who, or how many, might be armed and trained might keep him away.

As for trying again next year, he says,”I think I’m going to check and see what it would take for the law enforcement people to get behind it,” he says. “We don’t have the funding to put a law enforcement officer at every door, every entrance of a school, every playground, every bus trip out of town on a ball game, every bus in the morning coming in.”