Since Texas launched the school marshal program in 2013, just 84 school districts out of more than 1,200 have armed school staff. Educators say the program’s lack of popularity shows that teachers don’t want to be the ones to defend schools from mass shootings.
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Nearly a decade ago, Texas lawmakers created the school marshal program, a way for educators to carry weapons inside schools. It was the state’s rapid-fire legislative response to an unthinkable national horror 2,000 miles away when 20 first graders and six adults were shot and killed in a Sandy Hook, Connecticut, classroom just before Christmas 2012.
“Whoever is serving as the school marshal acts immediately,” state Rep. Jason Villalba, R-Dallas, said at the time, explaining how his bill would protect Texans in active shooter situations. “The whole point of this is to reduce response times from minutes down to seconds.”
The legislation empowers school districts to identify employees with a license to carry a firearm to volunteer as school protectors. Those individuals would undergo an 80-hour training and psychological exam, granting them access to a gun on campus. It is otherwise against federal law to have a firearm in a school zone.
But since the bill’s passage into law in 2013, just 84 school districts have opted into the program, a sliver of the more than 1,200 school districts...
Australia has issued a decision to investigate and prosecute Australian-Israeli dual nationals who served in the Israeli military in Gaza. Our verdict False. The government has not issued such a d...