Today Minnesota Democrats passed a bill pairing extreme gun control policies with bipartisan safe school measures, putting their partisan agenda over protecting students. The bill has no path forward in the House, putting funding for safe schools and mental health in jeopardy this session.
Senator Andrew Mathews (R–Princeton) released the following statement:
“We could immediately make our schools safer, but Democrats aren’t willing to do that unless they can also take away guns from law-abiding Minnesotans,” said Sen. Mathews. “Republicans want to send more money to schools for School Resource Officers, safety infrastructure, and mental health programs to address the root cause of the problem. These are measures that would actually work.
“Instead, Democrats passed a gun-grabbing bill that would ban semi-automatic weapons, force Minnesotans onto gun registries, expand red flag laws, which Democrats have lied about their effectiveness to Minnesotans for years, and strip local control away from schools by removing their authority to allow certain individuals to be armed in schools for an immediate response. The Democrats’ gun bill is actually going backwards and making our schools less safe than they are today. We have a God-given right to firearms, and Democrats voted to try to take that away. This was an unconscionable bill.”
Sen. Mathews offered an amendment that would strip the bill-stopping gun control measures and send a bipartisan school safety and mental health funding package to the House for passage, but it failed on party lines.
The amendment preserved: $20 million in safe schools supplement aid, $2.7 million for school-linked behavioral and mental health grants, $3.8 million for mobile crisis grants, and additional funding for certified family peer specialists, anonymous school threat reporting, mental health services, and mental health care professionals, would have passed with bipartisan support. It also increased from $1 million to $2 million the amount available to non-public schools for safety concerns.