Iowa Middle Schools Teaching Students Gun Safety Course

Middle schools in Butler County, Iowa, will implement two-week gun safety courses for students this spring.

The school district adopted the courses because of the popularity of hunting and the outdoors in and around that county.

Fox News reports that the accidental shooting death of 15-year-old Clarksville High School student Kain Allen Schild also made the issue important for district superintendent Joel Foster. The Courier reports that Schild suffered a fatal gunshot wound while fishing in May 2018.

Foster spoke in favor of the gun safety course following Schild’s death, saying, “Our job and what we do best is education and educating our kids is a lot better than having them learn about these things on the street.” He added, “With the number of weapons in our area and the access to them in the homes, I think it’s important that we do these things.”

The Department of Natural Resources and the Butler County Conservation Board will oversee the gun safety course.

Steve Martin, who is with the Conservation Board, said, “The program will start out with why we do hunter’s education and then the ways of how firearms work and then we move on to safe handling methods.”

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s Kyleanne Hunter criticized the decision to teach gun safety to the students, saying, “Middle schoolers haven’t developed the cognitive capacity of an adult to rationally understand the risk of firearms, and they likely can’t tell the difference between having a loaded and unloaded gun.”

Fox 8 reports that Superintendent Foster responded to the criticism by saying, “We have conditions in this country that have made this a political debate and it’s really not a political debate for us. We feel like we’re doing right for our community.”

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.