Maryland schools to host “gun safety assemblies”

Politicization of public education continues, at least in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland. The Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system announced to parents that their high school-aged children will be “educated” on gun safety during scheduled school assemblies this fall.

NBC Washington reported that MCPS Superintendent Dr. Monifa McKnight and Maryland State Attorney John McCarthy notified parents that they wanted to “be proactive” about gun safety.

“We want to be proactive, we don’t want to sit on the sidelines,” McCarthy said, “We want to be able to tell kids, look, if information comes to your attention, what do you do with it? How can you make yourself, and the entire school, safer?”

The letter noted, “Students must seek a trusted adult rather than choosing violence.”

The assemblies will allegedly give information about gun laws, consequences of gun violence, warning signs of someone who may turn to violence, and strategies to resolve problems without violence.

Parents have the option to not allow their children to participate in these assemblies.

The officials also shared figures from the Gun Violence Archives, which is a partisan data aggregation website. The site’s data claimed that the number of teenagers killed and injured by guns almost doubled since 2014.

The Gun Violence Archives claimed it is a non-partisan not-for-profit organization, but one of its founders is allegedly a liberal activist named Michael Klein. Klein used to be a co-founder of a liberal non-profit organization called the Sunlight Foundation, whose mission was to push for government transparency. But when the Sunlight Foundation became embroiled in a sexual misconduct controversy, the foundation was shut down in 2020.

There has been one gun-related incident in MCPS, where a seventeen-year-old black student shot another student at Magruder High School in January 2022. The victim has undergone at least nine surgeries and the assailant has since been charged with attempted murder. McCarthy chose to charge the assailant as an adult due to the premeditated nature of the attack and said the shooting was an example of bullying. The gun was alleged to be a “ghost gun,” which is a gun assembled through various unlicensed parts.

MCPS should consider the reasons behind the January 2022 shooting incident and not blame gun violence. For examples, going over issues such as gang violence or radicalization due to social media addiction should also be under consideration as topics for a school assembly. MCPS students would be better served by less politicization from its administrators and bureaucrats.

The Left has railed against gun ownership for decades and have imposed stringent restrictions in politically-blue states and cities, which policies have not reduced gun violence.

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