Rep. Warren Davidson, a co-sponsor of legislation to repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, told Newsmax on Tuesday that he believes it's important to empower all school districts to arm and train staff members to protect children in the event of an attacker.
"Everyone in the country knows we can't keep seeing this happen," the Ohio Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "We can't keep seeing our kids murdered by people with whatever motives they have. We have to protect our kids. And when you think that the most basic level every parent when they send their kids to school, they expect that school to be a safe place for their kids."
Davidson's legislation, the Safe Students Act, would allow school districts to determine if teachers and other staff members should be armed.
"In theory, there shouldn't be guns at school, but most importantly, there shouldn't be guns at school that are there to harm kids," said Davidson. "When I go to work in Congress, we have all kinds of guns. They're there to keep us safe. And after Jan. 6, they spent far more to keep us safe because the systems they had failed, and I think that's what we have to look at schools."
The legislation also works with the school choice, issue, said Davidson, because if parents don't like how a school handles its security, they can send their children to another school.
The congressman, however, does not think proposed ideas for red flag laws or age limits for guns are good ideas.
"Let's just start with the mental health side," he said. "Every single state in America and Washington, D.C., has a law or multiple laws on the books. They have someone adjudicated, mentally dangerous and even you know, you take the person into possession, not the weapons, because if it's the person that's dangerous. Why would you go after their weapons? Wouldn't you want to help the person and when you physically separated them, you've used due process to deprive the person of liberty to help protect them?"
Red flag laws, meanwhile, "skip due process" and accuse a person of being mentally dangerous without giving them the right to defend themselves.
"Then, instead of taking care of the person, you go seize the guns," said Davidson. "That doesn't stop that person from being free and getting guns in a different way or say, using a vehicle to drive through a parade."
Davidson, meanwhile, on Monday tweeted a meme saying that "if you allow the government to break the law because of an emergency, they will always create an emergency to break the law," and said he made the message to fight back against authoritarian behavior, such as has been recently seen in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pushing to ban handguns.
"That's not going to fly in the United States," he said. "We're going to defend the Second Amendment."
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Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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