In the Republican competition to make every state a hellhole, Ohio lawmakers continue to hold their own and then some. The Republican-held House just passed a new Looking At Children's Genitals Act, which will allow anyone in the state of Ohio to point at any child athlete and demand that their genitalia be examined if that Ohioan "disputes" the child's gender, which sounds like the sort of thing that QAnon would be all over if QAnon was not itself a thinly disguised pedophilia recruitment effort allied with (Matt Gaetz, cough) actual sex traffickers.
The Ohio Senate, in the meantime, has now passed a new More Guns In Schools Act, more formally known as House Bill 99. HB 99 cuts the number of hours of training required for schoolteachers and other school staff to become "certified" to carry loaded weapons in their schools; initial training "shall not exceed" 24 hours. This is considerably less than the 700 hours required of law enforcement officers in the state; this new bill clarifies an ambiguity that caused the state Supreme Court to rule that the legislature's previous More Guns In Schools Act required teachers to get the same level of training.
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This was, of course, an outrageous thought, so Republicans scurried to make sure the training requirements were dropped to a very small fraction of what other weapons carriers get. This is a school, after all, and it goes without saying that schools have a fraction of the resources that law enforcement gets. Nobody's going to pay for that level of training for people who only carry guns in schools.
That aside, it is commonly understood that having teachers open carry loaded weapons in schools is a purely theatrical device, one that will do little to nothing to impede mass murderers—but will provide students with a little spin-the-wheel lottery moment in the shooting's first moments as their teachers rush to draw their weapons, safety off, and fire at gunmen who have been ready to fire AR-15s from the moment they walked in the door.
Do you think your teacher could take down a mass murderer before he shoots, kids? It may depend on whether she is currently leaning over a student's desk, or has new assignments or graded homework in her hands. But it is irrelevant, because the point of the Ohio Republican bill is to come up with a solution to the regular murder of Americans by assault rifle that the gun lobby and the American militia-slash-sedition movement can abide.
To militia groups that premise themselves on being able to murder their way through the entire U.S. government, if government starts being too mean to them, and to the National Rifle Association spokescreatures that adopted that same rhetoric to turn a sport organization into a lobbying group for "good" mass murder, and to gun companies that have increasingly turned to marketing their products not to hunters, but to aspirational "good" mass murderers, the only acceptable answer to mass gun violence is one that sells more guns, not fewer. Anything that threatens to even delay a gun sale to a disturbed teen is opposed with fury and an insistence that our entire Way Of Life is at stake, so you can forget about measures to stop such sales.
Anyhow, we know how this is going to turn out because it keeps getting tried, in various forms, and the outcomes are not secret. If you are the sort of person who can manage a simple internet search, you can look it up. None of the bill's proponents bothered to ask either the state's teachers or the state's students what they thought of this performative little stunt, but most teachers still have absolutely no intent to carry a gun in their classrooms because everybody in the state who is not running a political campaign as a Republican knows that putting a loaded gun in a classroom, either sitting in a teacher's desk or holstered to a teacher's side, is among the most effective means devised of giving school children access to a loaded gun. If it's going to be effective it needs to be loaded; if it's loaded, then Ohio Republicans have now tripled the rate of school shootings in Ohio all by themselves.
That's right. The known outcome of United States programs to put armed security officers and other "good" gunmen in our children's schools has been to nearly triple school shootings. The new Ohio bill will have the near-certain result of killing children in their schools—for the sake of a publicity stunt.
Or, if you want to put that another way, Ohio House and Senate Republicans will in future years be able to boast that they implemented a new state law that's responsible for almost twice as many public school deaths as the state's murderers and mass murderers could manage.
Will there be a true crimes docudrama in ten years' time that charts the killing spree of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is expected to sign this bill into law? Will future narrators try to convince us that Ohio statehouse Republicans were quiet folks, really, people who mostly kept to themselves?
Eh, probably not. What we will get, however, are claims from each of the lawmakers who voted for this bill that nobody could have foreseen that school gun deaths in Ohio would so dramatically increase, with the added insistence that "nobody knows" why that might be happening and a new bill proposing that even more guns be added to the mix.
Or we could make it more difficult to get rifles specifically designed for killing as many other humans in as short a span of time as is possible. We could do that. That is the approach that has been proven to work in every country that has tried it, over and over again. But those other countries weren't controlled in large part by a pro-insurrection, pro-coup, pro-"good"-terrorism political party that insists those guns need to spread freely so that their own base can assassinate any government officials who attempt to enforce laws they do not like.
And that is an American "mental health" problem that Republicans have no intention of addressing.
Elie Mystal is on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast today