Gun violence has become a repetitive part of the U.S. experience, and Iowa is no exception. The state government’s response has been entirely inadequate.
Iowa was promised over $75 million to fund school security in 2022. Two school shootings later, that money still has not been received and more gun expansion laws have been passed. Iowa’s state government has done a terrible job of combatting gun violence.
On Jan. 4, a deadly school shooting occurred at Perry High School, leaving a student and principal dead and seven others wounded. A year earlier, a shooting occurred in January 2023 at East High’s charter school in Des Moines, in which two students were killed.
Since these shootings, Iowa legislators have taken no action, instead expanding gun usage.
In June 2022, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Iowa would use over $75 million from pandemic relief funds to increase school security measures in schools, which came in response to the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
In an act of stunning hypocrisy, Reynolds signed a bill that would allow wider use of guns just a few weeks after the massacre at Uvalde. Even worse, she promised that over 1,500 Iowa schools would receive $50,000 to “fix vulnerabilities,” but many of those schools have still not received this funding.
According to the Associated Press, “most schools statewide have yet to receive funding, including those in Perry, a city of 8,000 people … ”
After these shootings and a failed opportunity to prevent them, it is clear the state government is incompetent at tackling gun violence. It’s not just the missing school funding—it’s also the gun expansion legislation.
The Iowa House passed a new bill in March to arm teachers at school. Teachers should not be responsible for protecting students from armed intruders. It’s not their responsibility to risk their lives to protect students, not to mention having access to guns in the classroom is dangerous for both the students and the teachers.
Reynolds told the public that the deaths of those in Perry and Des Moines were the fault of the education system, as the suspects “weren’t in school.”
“The tragedy is our educational system is letting these kids down. They should have been in school. We should be figuring out resources to help them stay there,” Reynolds said, according to KCCI.
While she has a point about students staying in school to avoid entering “a life of crime,” there are other ways to tackle gun violence that do not include giving weapons to teachers or expanding the usage of firearms.
Rather than doing the sensible thing in calling for stricter gun control or doing anything that can prevent criminals from obtaining their weapons, she blames the education system.
According to the Quad-City Times, Reynolds also said “no additional gun laws would have prevented what happened. There’s just evil out there.”
It seems as though Iowa’s legislators, and particularly Reynolds, simply do not care about school security, as they pitch nothing but bad idea after bad idea.
