Following the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, there was a lot of talk about addressing school safety in Minnesota. Sure enough, as the legislative session began, the debate started, and only one side was talking about school safety. The other side wasn't all that worried about it.
They said they were, of course, but only so far as gun control was concerned.
Democrats, as they do after most high-profile shootings, reverted to form and started pushing for numerous anti-gun measures, and Republicans in the Gopher State held firm, offering something different, and guess what's happening?
But with every passing day, their efforts are at increasing risk of falling to the same partisan stalemate that has defined the political response to school shootings in recent decades.
“I’m not shocked,” said Mike Moyski, father of 10-year-old Harper Moyski, who was killed during the shooting. “I am disappointed that parties aren’t working together more.”
Still, Moyski said he and other Annunciation parents are hopeful that legislators will find a path forward. They have until just May 18 to work through significant differences between the two parties on how to approach school safety.
Competing school safety plans
Early last week, Republicans introduced a package of policies that includes the encouragement of new anonymous threat-reporting systems, the rollback of a 2023 DFL-backed law that prohibited the suspension of K-3 students, increased mental health funding and tens of millions of dollars in new spending on security-improvement grants that would be available to public and private schools.
Republicans have fought hard to fund security upgrades at private and tribal schools, noting that Annunciation should benefit from whatever lawmakers do this session. Those would be paid for, in part, by raiding a state savings account set up for the proposed Northern Lights Express train between Duluth and the Twin Cities.
“My fundamental goal is simple: Protect students in every school,” sponsor Rep. Bryan Lawrence, R-Princeton, said during a floor debate last week.
See, the issue here is that, for the anti-gun Democrats in the state, the only thing they want is gun control. They can't see school safety as a complex system that needs to be refined as new practices are learned. They don't actually care about school safety. They care about gun control.
We can tell this not because I'm pro-gun and disagree with gun control, but because they're not willing to come together on things that shouldn't be controversial, like security upgrades at private and tribal schools. I mean, as it says above, Annunciation is a private school. How do you get off using a tragedy at a private school to address what happened, only to lock the very same school out of those benefits?
Keep in mind that private school parents pay taxes, too, including the property taxes that often fund public schools. They get no benefits from that, and they accept that as part of the price of private education, but security should be something different. The Teachers' Union, however, is the holdup there, and Democrats are beholden to that particular union, among others.
Guns aren't the only potential threat to a school. Let's not forget the school massacre at Bath Township nearly a century ago. That maniac used dynamite, and as a farmer, he could get it even under today's laws.
See, the Democrats there aren't worried about school safety. They're worried about gun control, and they're using the term "school safety" as a euphemism to try to get it.
Republicans, for their many failings, are at least focused on trying to make schools safer without violating people's rights.
Were it not for a complicit media, I suspect that a lot of people would recognize that even if they believe gun control should be part of the answer, Democrats should at least come together with the GOP on these other proposals, too.
But they won't, because it's never actually about school safety for them. It's what they can get here and now on gun control.
