Arizona Republicans Advance Bill Improving Armed School Staff Policies

Arizona’s legislature took a step forward in protecting students and staff on Tuesday when the House Education Committee approved HB 2022 on a party line vote. The bill, authored by State Rep. Selina Bliss, a nurse, firearms instructor, and staunch 2A advocate, would allow public school staff to carry a concealed firearm (with district approval) after completing 40 hours of training. State law already allows for districts to authorize staffers to carry, but HB 2022 establishes a minimum number of training hours as well as setting up a fund to reimburse school districts and individual educators who pay for that training. 

It’s a pretty simple bill that offers some improvement on the status quo, but Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts sees the measure as a well-intended but fundamentally flawed piece of legislation. 

“The whole purpose for this (bill) is the ability for educators and staff to be able to defend not only themselves but the students that they’re in charge of,” Michael Infanzon, the Arizona Citizens Defense League lobbyist who wrote the bill, told the House Education Committee on Tuesday. 

It’s a noble goal.

Here’s what Infanzon couldn’t explain. 

How a teacher, charged with keeping his or her students hidden behind locked doors, could abandon those kids and charge forth as the school’s SWAT officer.

Or how police officers, arriving on a chaotic scene, would be able to differentiate between the bad guy armed with a gun and the good guy armed with a gun.

“You’ll have to have your picture taken, so law enforcement will know who is certified,” he explained, presumably assuming that cops on an active shooter call would have the time to compare pictures with faces and determine who is authorized to be carrying a gun on campus and who is not.

To answer Roberts’ first objection, I’d simply point out that not every school staffer who would be armed would be a classroom instructor. Research from the Homeland Security Institute at Purdue University indicates that the fastest way to stop a school shooter is to have armed teachers sheltering in place with their students, ready to defend their classroom if the door is breached, while armed school resource officers search for and engage the shooter. 

In districts too small to have a dedicated SRO on campus, it may be administrative employees who take that proactive stance of engaging the attacker, leaving armed teachers to defend their classroom if necessary. Either way, Roberts’ concern about teachers leaving their students is easy to address. 

As for Roberts’ second objection, we have unfortunately seen incidents where lawfully armed citizens responding to an active shooter situation were shot and killed by police, so her concern isn’t entirely unfounded. Those tragic mistakes are incredibly rare, however, and the danger could be mitigated through additional training set up by the school district in cooperation with local law enforcement and/or campus police, giving cops and armed school staff the opportunity to get to know each other and to train together on responding to an active shooter situation. 

Roberts’ last objection is that the Republicans in the Arizona legislature are arming school staff instead of funding programs that allow troubled kids “to get help before they come to class, locked and loaded”. The truth is that this isn’t an either/or proposition. You can have armed school staff and a robust support system in place for students who need it; including counseling, behavioral threat analysis, and peer-to-peer student support. 

An “all of the above” approach is the best route to take; but that includes the ability for trained and vetted volunteer staffers to serve as a first line of defense against those intent on slaughtering our children. When seconds count police are likely to be minutes away, and why wouldn’t Roberts want as quick a response to a deadly threat on campus as possible?