Administrators at three Gainesville City Schools will vote later in October on whether to purchase three AR-15 assault rifles and biometric gun safes for their schools. The schools’ governance councils, bodies at each school that will make the final decision, have been considering the plan since early September.
The Gainesville Police Department proposed the $6,000 plan in a Board of Education business meeting on Sept. 3. If approved, the district will place one rifle each at Gainesville High School, Gainesville Middle School and Wood’s Mill Academy, an alternative school for grades 6-12 with 100 students.
Cpl. Joseph Britte of the Gainesville Police Department’s community relations department said the proposal had previously been tabled, but resurfaced after an August shooting at McNair Elementary School in Dekalb County.
“What we’ve done is added more firepower,” Britte said, expressing the difficulty of responding to an armed intruder with only a pistol as defense. “When you see these school shootings, the perpetrator has more powerful weapons than us.”
The national gun control debate has touched on the issue of assault rifles in schools. The National Rifle Association is a leading advocate of guns in schools; its National School Shield task force released a 225-page report in April, which proposes arming teachers and other administrators in addition to School Resource Officers (SROs).
In January, President Barack Obama issued 23 executive actions on gun control, one of which proposed better training for law enforcement officers, school officials and teachers that could be involved in a school shooting. Obama, however, ideologically opposed to the NRA, has not endorsed more powerful firearms in schools.
The Gainesville Police Department is in charge of all security for the Gainesville City School System, which is composed of eight schools. The three schools where gun safes are proposed are the system’s largest and house its oldest students. The other five are elementary schools.
Since all Gainesville City Schools are charter schools, each school’s governance council will decide whether to install the safes. The school board held a public forum to discuss the proposal on Sept. 30, but only governance councils will vote on the policy.
Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), said more schools are ramping up security in response to school shootings.
Canady said NASRO has worked with the agencies that install the safes, and that they rarely pose risks.
“In those particular lockers, the only risks would be if someone got control of the combination or the key to the locker,” Canady said.
Sammy Smith, a member of the Gainesville school board and a graduate of Gainesville High School, said Gainesville’s safes will be more advanced, secured with measures like fingerprinting and eye recognition.
In the event of an extreme emergency, only SROs will have access to the gun safes. Britte said the officers will lock the rifles in their cars every night.
The school system has just three SROs, who are also in charge of security for the district’s elementary schools. Currently, each officer is armed with a handgun. Britte said since officers must “rove” around to multiple schools, there is not always an SRO in every school, and elementary schools get the least coverage. Canady said that, as a result of funding shortages, many schools are often left unmanned.
Delores Diaz, the vice chair of the Gainesville Board of Education, said the plan was not a response to problems in Gainesville schools, but was put forward as a precautionary measure because of incidents in Georgia and across the country.
“We haven’t had any problems locally, but we want to be proactive,” Diaz said.
Smith expressed similar thoughts.
“There are no major security problems [in Gainesville schools] that I can recall,” Smith said. “An occasional fight between two students. I recall two incidents of graffiti.”
Smith also said he believed having assault rifles in safes was a fairly common security measure for schools to take. Canady was unaware of specificities but has seen gun safes installed elsewhere.
“I don’t know that [having a gun safe is] overly common, but it’s not uncommon either,” Canady said.
Diaz’s main goal is to make schools more secure, especially since her grandchildren attend the schools in which rifle safes would be placed.
“I’d prefer to have a weapon in the hands of a trained officer,” she said. “I definitely don’t support anyone else in the building being armed.”
While the vote on the Gainesville Police Department’s plan has not yet taken place, its widespread support may indicate a strong future for assault rifles in schools.
