Law enforcement officers in every school proposal moving through legislature
Tallahassee, Fla- A Florida Senate committee has endorsed a proposal to put law enforcement officers in every school in the state.
Only slightly more than half of Florida’s more than 4,000 public schools have the resource officers. They are sworn law-enforcement officers and allowed to carry a weapon on a school campus.
The Senate Education Committee voted Tuesday to include the requirement in a sweeping education bill that is now moving through the legislature.
Sheriff William Snyder said every middle and high school in Martin County has a full time School Resource Officer. St Lucie County Public Schools have 29 school resource officers and 3 supervisors working full time.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School also had an armed resource officer on campus at the time of the shooting. The campus is so large and the shooting was over so quickly that the officer never was able to engage the shooter.
Meanwhile, the state House has voted down a motion to take up a bill that would ban assault rifles. This effectively killed the measure for this session.
And at the federal level, President Trump yesterday ordered Attorney General Jeff Sessions to regulate the use of bump stocks. Bump stocks were used by the Las Vegas shooter in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Bump stocks allow a semiautomatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic rifle.
There was a national call to ban them after the Vegas shooting, but nothing happened in Congress.
