Indiana Gov.-elect Mike Pencetold reporters that the state's school safety measures need to be examined, but not the state's gun laws.
"This is not about access to guns. It's about access to schools," he said Wednesday, no doubt creating a huff among those Hoosiers who believe new restricts are needed on high capacity, rapid fire, military-style weapons. This discussion comes in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn. massacre in which 26 people, including 20 first grade children, were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Pence is right, that school safety procedures and structure need to be examined, to better assure that armed maniacs cannot get into our schools. But the question about gun laws needs to go to federal officials, not state officials, here or elsewhere.
Indeed, if this nation is serious now about limiting the accessibility a certain type of weapon and ammunition holders, then it must be federal law and not state laws that is changed.
What good would it do to restrict the sales of certain weapons in one state, but not another? Even with restrictions and paperwork, that's too easy for the devious individual determined to acquire weapons of mass killing.
A ban must be consistent from border to border, and that can only be done with federal law.
Pence said the spending plan he plans to present to state legislators when they go into their budget-writing session in January will include a specific request for resources for a comprehensive review of school safety. He said Indiana already requires each school to have a trained and certified school safety specialist on site, as well as school safety policies in place.
"In this regard, Indiana has been distinguished. We're proud of that. But we look forward to examining ways we can build on that," Pence said.
In Newtown, the killer, Adam Lanza, either broke or shot the locked front door of the school to gain entrance. Lanza brought a semiautomatic Bushmaster AF-15 rife and two handguns into the school and left a shotgun in the car he drove to the school.
Current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said many Indiana schools already have armed security officers, but he added, "When someone is determined to do something as monstrous as that, I don't know exactly how much money you would have to spend and what kind of precautions you could take to ever have a fail-safe system."
The Newtown case has created questions about weapons, about safety, about violence in entertainment, about mental illness.
Among them, the questions about weapons need to go to the House, the Senate and the Obama administration.