Keep Your Guns Away From My Child

My home state of Georgia recently passed a law that I believe is dangerous.  One of the provisions allows felons to use the awful "Stand Your Ground" defense if they kill someone...with a firearm that it's illegal for them to have in the first place.  Apparently the nonexistent Second Amendment rights of felons are more important than the safety of anyone who unintentionally "threatens" them.  There are also provisions involving schools that my husband and I specifically protested by writing the following letter to our daughter's principal and copied to the system superintendent.

Dear Principal _____—

We'd like to begin by thanking you for everything you do for _______ Elementary School.  We are so pleased to have our daughter in a school where teachers care about her and she is getting a high quality education, despite the many challenges and barriers faced by educators these days.  That doesn’t happen without a strong leader.

We are deeply concerned about House Bill 60, which was recently signed into law.  In fact, we cannot overstate our concern about this.  Our understanding is that the law allows any school official to carry a weapon on school grounds as long as permission is granted by the district.  The law also prohibits police from questioning anyone about whether they have a permit or checking for permits, because no statewide database can be created, which basically grants everyone a concealed carry permit, regardless of criminal background or mental history. 

We are gun owners and we both grew up around guns.  We aren't anti-gun but we do believe it defies common sense to have loaded weapons around children.  We don’t believe that school officials would ever harm our child intentionally – in fact, we believe they’d give up their lives defending her if needed -- but we do know children are curious and persistent and adults make mistakes.  If guns are allowed in schools, we are certain that tragedy will ensue when a child is able to get access to the gun of a teacher or a gun is misfired by an adult, as has already happened in a Texas school.  We don’t want our daughter (or anyone else’s child) to become just another gun death statistic or to be catastrophically injured.

Given our level of concern about this development, we respectfully submit two requests

1.      Please deny anyone (other than trained police officers) who requests to bring a gun onto school property. 

2.      If you cannot deny such requests, please immediately notify us if anyone in the school other than a police officer is carrying a weapon on school grounds.  We will then request information about how to have our daughter removed from the classroom if that person is her teacher and removed from the person's presence if not a teacher.

It would break our hearts to have to remove our daughter from a teacher she loves, but we will go to any length to protect her from physical harm and trauma.  We cannot, in good conscience, ever allow her to be around well-meaning but untrained individuals with weapons and children who may grab them.

Respectfully,