For more than 10 years, Walton County sheriff’s deputies have been assigned to public middle and high schools. They are called school resource deputies, or SRDs. I have known three who have served at South Walton High School since it opened. Each has been a positive role model, a friend to students and a help in maintaining discipline. If the program is extended to elementary schools, I will gladly pay a few more tax dollars.
I do not, however, want an SRD to have to charge into a classroom and face an intruder armed with a military-style semiautomatic weapon with a 30- or 100-round clip of ammunition.
For 10 years, such weapons were banned. Had Congress re-enacted that law, the mother of the Sandy Hook shooter would not have been able to purchase one, her son would not have had access to it, and some of the 20 children and six teachers might be alive today.
I am ashamed that my congressman, Jeff Miller, and my senator, Marco Rubio, support the gun manufacturers’ lobby rather than our children and our law enforcement officers.
— JOHN STRATTON
Santa Rosa Beach