The same president inaugurated under the watchful eye of thousands of National Guard troops and behind the protection of barricades and fences now dismisses the idea of securing schools because it doesn’t fit his gun-grabbing goals.
The White House admitted on Tuesday that President Joe Biden has no interest in “hardening schools” against potential attacks from people like the school shooter in Uvalde, Texas.
“I know there’s been conversation about hardening schools. That is not something that he believes in,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a press briefing.
You heard that right. Instead of investing in security resources for the nation’s taxpayer-funded schools, training staff, and even arming teachers to defend themselves against shooters like the 18-year-old gunman who took the lives of 21 people last week, Biden is more focused on passing legislation or issuing executive orders aimed at slowly restricting Americans’ right to own guns. That’s why Democrats have repeatedly rejected legislation designed to fund and codify security overhauls in U.S. public schools.
Reports about what happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde are still muddled thanks to contradicting information given by local law enforcement. Recent statements from Texas State Police, however, suggest that the teacher who was originally believed to have propped a back door open with a rock, the same back door that was eventually utilized by the shooter to enter the school, did close the door, but it did not lock properly.
A school building with adequate security infrastructure wouldn’t fail to lock doors. As a matter of fact, it would have a heavily monitored single point of entry. A teacher with adequate training against external threats would know never to prop a door open in the first place. An armed teacher or security guard might have been able to take down the armed suspect instead of waiting nearly an hour for a Border Patrol tactical unit to breach the school and kill the shooter.
According to the White House, however, implementing processes to address those issues is not on the table. Instead, Jean-Pierre said Biden “believes that we should be able to give our teachers the resources to be able to do the job that they’re meant to do at schools.”
