Forced to cap offer at 300 after huge response.
HAMILTON, Ohio (PNN) - February 25, 2018 - An Ohio sheriff who offered free firearms training to 50 teachers was forced to cap his offer at 300, after a flood of local school employees signed up in the wake of a Florida high school shooting that left 17 people dead. “We put it online, we thought we’d get 20 schoolteachers maybe. Within 20 minutes we had 40. Within an hour we had 100. Within four hours we had 200. By the next morning, at 300, we cut it off,” Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said on Fox & Friends.
The Parkland, Florida shooting has renewed a national debate on the Second Amendment. Sheriff Jones noted that only a few schools in Ohio allow the concealed carry of a firearm, and that the plan to arm teachers would only work if "the school boards have the guts to make it a reality." Jones suggested that school staffers should go through mandatory firearms training to help them identify the sounds of gunfire.
“We have to do something here because we can’t wait for our government to do anything. All they do is fight, they get nothing done,” he said.
Four days ago during a White House "listening session" on school shootings, President Donald Trump suggested arming teachers - a call he has repeated since.
"If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly, and the good thing about a suggestion like that - and we're going to be looking at it very strongly, and I think a lot of people are going to be opposed to it. I think a lot of people are going to like it. But the good thing is you're going to have a lot of [armed] people with that," said the president.
“We can’t stop the school shootings, we can’t stop guns from being manufactured, but we've got to do something, we've got to make the schools more of a hardened target,” said Sheriff Jones - adding that the class was open to teachers, secretaries and maintenance workers.
“We have to do something here because we can’t wait for our government to do anything. All they do is fight, they get nothing done,”
Sheriff Richard K. Jones, Butler County, Ohio
