All School Officers To Be Armed With AR-15s In North Carolina County

MADISON COUNTY, NC — A school system in rural North Carolina will start the new year with an AR-15 in each school after 19 children and two teachers were killed last spring in Texas.

“We’ve got to be prepared even in our rural counties for the enemy when he tries to come in and deter our children, when he tries to come in and destroy our children — we’ve got to be prepared for that,” Madison County Sheriff Buddy Harwood said in a video on Facebook. “I just want to ensure our parents that in the coming school year that we’re going to exhaust every resource we’ve got to ensure that our kids are safe.”

Each school in the Madison County system has an assigned sheriff’s deputy who operates as a school resource officer, according to Harwood, who said all such officers would be armed with an AR-15, optics and an accessory. The guns were purchased with money donated by Madison County residents, he said. The rifles will be kept in undisclosed gun safes and officers were set to receive tactical training, according to Harwood.

“God forbid that anyone ever come to our schools to cause harm, but if they do come to my school I want my resource officers to have the ability to meet violence with violence,” he said. “To those who might be looking to terrorize or harm our Madison County kids, don’t bring that foolishness to Madison County, because it won’t end well.”

A panic button system will notify a monitoring center and the sheriff’s office in case of an emergency, Superintendent Will Hoffman said, according to The Citizen-Times. The school system and sheriff’s office will also replicate a “high-impact incident” later in the month, a process that will use helicopters and include all teachers, The Citizen-Times reported.

The new measures in Madison County come after the May 24 mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas. Nearly 400 officers responded to the school but “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” taking more than an hour to stop the shooter, a Texas House committee report found, according to The Texas Tribune.

Dr. Doroth Espelage, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, referred to the measures taken in Madison County as “hardening of the schools,” WLOS reported.

“What's going to happen is we're going to have accidents with these guns,” she told WLOS. “Just the presence of an SRO increases violence in the schools. There's more arrests of kids. Why is it that they have to have these AR-15s? It doesn't make any sense.”