Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island announced yesterday that she was banning “all firearms, except those carried by police officers, from public schools and grounds in Rhode Island.”
The functional outcome of this decree will be to prevent concealed carry permit holders from carrying on school grounds. Concealed carry permit holders in Rhode Island are highly vetted with background checks, qualification tests, psychological exams in some cases, references and the imprimatur of the Attorney General or their local police chief. Removing these trained, armed, upstanding members of the community from schools makes kids less safe, not more so.
The move is an obvious political gimmick to protect Raimondo from her further-left leaning primary challenger. Additionally, it may not even be legal. The Providence Journal reports:
Cranston Mayor and Republican candidate for governor Allan Fung said, “I am not sure I would go there because you have law-abiding citizens that honestly. … with response times, could be a first line of defense” against a shooter.
Fung’s campaign said that he would soon unveil his own plan “to strengthen safety measures in our schools” — a move Raimondo has already taken — “which I feel will do a better job at actually addressing all of our concerns.”
Republican candidate for governor Patricia Morgan accused Raimondo and other Democrats in Rhode Island of continuing to wage war on the Constitution. “They won’t stop until they erode the 2nd Amendment in Rhode Island,” she said. Fellow Republican gubernatorial candidate Giovanni Feroce accused Raimondo of pandering to the “extreme left.”
Meanwhile, Raimondo’s Democratic primary challenger Matt Brown, said his position “has always been to ban guns in schools.”
Larry Purtill, president of the National Education Association Rhode Island, and Steven M. Pare, Providence’s commissioner of public safety were among the supporters of the gun ban.
“There is no place for weapons of any kind to be kept within our schools other than in the possession of trained law enforcement officials,” said Pare.
One superintendent, Lawrence Filippelli of Lincoln, worried that Wagner’s directive would put schools at odds with existing state laws.
“Clearly, we all want our schools to be safe,” he said, “but before we make any policy decision, we should take a pause and wait for guidance from the General Assembly because there could be some contradiction with existing law.”
Read more here.
