Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed Act 229 into law earlier this month, which requires public and open enrollment public charter schools to provide age-appropriate firearm safety instruction beginning during the 2025-2026 school year. Meanwhile the state’s Division of Elementary and Secondary Education will work with the Arkansas State Game and Fish Commission to determine the earliest grade in which they will begin.
The measure is not designed to promote gun ownership. It is, rather, designed as a measure to enhance the safety of young and curious minds, like NRA’s wildly effective Eddie Eagle GunSafe program that began in 1988. “This is going to be really basic, I mean, you know, basically a firearm safety version of Stop, drop and roll,” Trey Reid, spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission explained to 5 News.
“All of our children play together and invade whatever home happens to be the play of the day,” lead sponsor of the bill Rep. Scott Richardson told Fox News. “And in that process, they may go into a neighbor’s home and discover that unsecured firearm ... .”
Video and online courses are acceptable, according to the measure, and the new law does make provisions for off-campus lessons. “If an off-campus, commission-approved firearm safety course is provided in conjunction with a live-fire exercise or sporting event,” it states, “the provider of the off-campus, commission-approved firearm safety course and the public school district or open-enrollment public charter school in which the participating student is enrolled shall obtain prior written approval from the participating student’s parent, legal guardian, or person standing in loco parentis to the participating student.”
“Let’s remove the unknown factor,” Richardson said. “Let’s make sure we portray it as what it really is, that it is a firearm ... and make sure that they know how to appropriately respond by going and alerting an adult that that situation exists.”
Eddie Eagle’s lesson is just those four steps. Stop. Don’t touch. Run away. Tell a grown-up.
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