Get paid more to carry at work? N.C. bill incentivizes armed teachers with raises

Would you like to keep yourself and your workplace safer while getting paid more to do so? Some North Carolina state senators want to give public school teachers that option, with a bill that incentivizes them to carry guns on the job.

Introduced on Wednesday, "The School Security Act of 2019” would raise salaries for Tarheel State teachers who decide to carry on campus after taking specialized police training, the Raleigh News & Observer reports.

The legislation is an update on previous versions, which would have allowed for armed educators but didn’t include a pay incentive. This version allocates $9.3 million to cover the cost of training and pay increases. After the completion of their training, teachers would be up for a five percent salary bump.

“This is an idea whose time has come,” Senate Majority Whip Jerry Tillman, R-Randolph County, told the newspaper. “With the heightened awareness of the legislature, I believe this bill will see success.”

While anti-gun groups have opposed the idea of arming teachers in the debate about how to address school shootings, others have embraced it.

A bill before the Florida legislature would appoint armed “school marshals” in the Sunshine State. Texas already has a similar program. An Ohio school district recently won a lawsuit over its required training time for armed faculty and staff members. A bill currently in the Indiana legislature would create a state-approved firearms curriculum for armed teachers.

In a country with almost 400 million guns, where “universal background checks” are basically unenforceable without registering all of them, and where criminals prefer to acquire their hardware outside the proper channels, the best defense against a bad person with a gun in a classroom is a good person with a gun ready and trained to fire back.

And who doesn’t like a nice pay raise while they’re at it?

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