The Santa Fe, New Mexico Public School Board conducted a vote Tuesday night to determine whether or not to reject funding from the National Rifle Association that was donated to the Santa Fe High School JROTC program.
In light of the latest school shooting in Parkland, Florida a few weeks ago, they opted to tell the NRA where they could stick that money.
The Daily Wire is reporting:
The funding isn’t exorbitant, amounting to $4,000, according to School Board president Steve Carrillo, who said, “This vote tonight is about one thing. Not about the Second Amendment, not about the firearms, but just about the district not taking NRA funds,” then rubbed salt in the NRA’s wound by saying, “I already know two other board members who have been working with community partners and I believe by the end of the week, we could have four thousand dollars by the drop of the hat.”
The JROTC at the high school has won first place recently in two national contests.
NRA spokesperson Catherine Mortensen told KOAT 7, “The school board would punish a program such as JROTC, which teaches leadership and develops character among local youth, just to make a political point. The school board should be made to absorb the costs of this program out of their own budget.”
Albuquerque Public Schools, which is New Mexico’s largest school district, got $126,000 toward JROTC from 2010 to 2016, some of which came from the NRA, according to an Associated Press report.
This, again, is a bad call that’s been made for the sake of pushing a particular anti-gun agenda that seeks to paint the NRA as evil, murderous super villains instead of a group comprised of rational, well educated Second Amendment supporters who take guns and safety seriously.
While the school board says they can get the money some other way and that it’s not a large amount, any little bit of extra funding is a good thing so why, unless the group itself is responsible for evil and wrongdoing, would you reject free money?
Public schools are notoriously underfunded in larger cities, so you’d think the people of Santa Fe would keep all the help they could get.
Sooner or later, people need to realize the truth and grasp a hold of it tightly. Neither the NRA, nor guns, are to blame for what happened in Florida or any other school shooting. A particular individual and that individual alone is responsible for these incidents.
If we spent more time coming up with solutions to tackle human evil and enforcing the laws already on the books, perhaps these tragedies wouldn’t keep happening.
