Our children matter.

If your child is still going to school, either public or private, I'm sure you have at least some concerns about how secure that school actually is. While school massacres are, thankfully, rare, they're not really rare enough for anyone's comfort. The preferred number of such atrocities, after all, is zero and we're far from that.

In Kentucky, a bill is being discussed that would create armed "guardians" that would guard schools. These are volunteer positions that would be trained appropriately and then placed in schools to hopefully deter the kind of horrors we've seen elsewhere.

But, unsurprisingly, some think it's a bad idea.

One op-ed intended to push the idea of a mandatory storage bill as the superior alternative, illustrated so much of what's wrong with the anti-gun side.

This is in stark contrast to Senate Bill 2—sponsored by Sen. Max Wise, asking for armed “guardians” in our schools—which was filed, assigned, discussed and voted on in one week.

SB 2 would turn our schools into 'armed fortresses'

On Feb. 29, I sat in the front row for the Senate Standing Committee on Education to witness the discussion of SB 2, which purports to fill a void for the hundreds of Kentucky schools that do not have an armed school resource officer (SRO) due to lack of funds or lack of qualified applicants.

As the bill stands today, “guardians” are unpaid positions. Yes, you read that right. Unpaid volunteers, possibly retired law enforcement officers (LEOs) or military, who will receive training to carry guns in our schools.

I can’t believe anyone needs to say this, but it is wildly unrealistic to make an unpaid volunteer responsible for protecting hundreds of kids and staff from a surprise attack by someone on a suicidal shooting rampage.

Now, let's start by noting that I'd actually agree with this if the alternative was to pay guardians so they'd be obligated to be on-site each and every day.

But that's not on the table here. That's not what the author is advocating for.

Instead, she wants there to be absolutely no defense for children in Kentucky schools, somehow thinking a mandatory storage bill would be the game-changer. Let's not forget that in Parkland, Uvalde, Virginia Tech, and Columbine--the four of the worst school shootings in American history--the killers didn't take weapons from Mom and Dad. They'd obtained those guns on their own, meaning a mandatory storage law would be less than useless in preventing these shootings.

But an armed guardian might make a difference.

Sen. Reggie Thomas made a salient point. “When I read this bill, all I envision is that our children are going to begin going to fortresses, armed fortresses, and that we are moving further and further away from learning centers and moving further toward armed camps.”

Fortresses are good things, though. They're bastions of safety for whose within. Turning schools into fortresses is hardly a bad thing in and of itself.

As for learning centers, from what I'm seeing pushed by the educational establishment, the thing moving schools further and further away from learning centers is what they're claiming is education, but I digress.

The truth of the matter, though, is that a fortress is a place that is intended to keep people safe. If you see that as a bad thing, you don't understand fortresses.

But the author of this piece next asks, "Is this where we are headed, schools as prisons?" 

Fortresses and prisons are very different things, and the truth of the matter is that the author never uttered a word about any of the other factors at schools that could be argued to be prison-like. For example, a student has no say on whether his bag is searched by the authorities. Students can't come and go as they like, being restricted to school property without special conditions being met.

She was fine with all of that, but armed volunteers are suddenly shifting us from school to fortress to prison?

And then we have this bit, that's just too freaking rich for words.

Cathy Hobart, a long-time gun safety advocate, testified in opposition of SB 2, saying in part that “Sen. Wise brought up Uvalde. How many guns were in that school? How many armed people were there that day, standing outside the door where the shooter was? And those kids were dying inside that room. There has to be a different solution to this problem…” and “Sen. Neal has a bill that you’ve never considered that has to do with safe storage of guns. The kids that are shooting kids in school get their guns at home.”

It's disturbing how often they'll bring up Uvalde without understanding that this is a different matter entirely.

The truth is that Uvalde was a law enforcement failure. Even the Department of Justice has acknowledged that fact. Standard procedure in an active shooter situation is to go into the building and take down the bad guy. All those guns at Uvalde stayed outside of the parts of the school where they were needed. This isn't remotely on the same level.

This is about volunteers, people who want to protect human life. They're in the school and ready to act, not sitting outside scared of one bad guy and refusing to act.

Yet the mention of Uvalde is even more grotesque from someone pushing mandatory storage as an alternative.