Guns in Forsyth County Schools Represent a Crisis of Leadership

In April 2024, a student at Little Mill MS, here in Forsyth County, brought a loaded gun to school, and another student took pictures/video of the gun and posted them to social media. A third student let a teacher know, averting what could have been an unspeakable tragedy.

In the aftermath, Forsyth Sheriff Ron Freeman praised (rightly) the bravery of the student who spoke out, and reiterated the importance of the district’s “see something, say something” policy of identifying threats to student safety. Another version of this story unfolded last week in Wisconsin, only in that case, police fatally shot the 14 year-old who’d brought the gun to school.  It’s a horrible reminder of what could have happened here.

Lots of Forsyth parents were left feeling that this situation represents multiple systemic failures: How did this child gain access to this gun, and are the gun owners going to be held responsible? The sheriff’s office commented only that “the parents had their gun safely stored,” but if a child was able to get it and take it to school, it wasn’t safely stored. Gun violence is the number one cause of death for children and teens, in Georgia and in the US as a whole. We feel that Sheriff Freeman squandered an opportunity to educate parents and people in the community about the bare-minimum responsibility that comes with the right to own guns--that they must be kept out of the hands of children. Eighty percent of school shooters obtained their guns from the home of a parent or relative, these are preventable tragedies.

This is common sense gun safety to everyone except our elected Republican leadership. In the 2024 Georgia legislative session, Representative Michelle Au sponsored HB 161, the Pediatric Safe Storage bill, which would have held gun owners criminally liable for their guns being accessed by children. It was the first piece of common sense gun legislation to get a hearing in Georgia in ten years. She also introduced HB 971, a bill that would have given tax credits for the purchase of biometric gun safes (which would’ve prevented the Little Mill incident). Nobody in our Forsyth delegation supported any of this legislation. 
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For those who say this isn’t a gun issue, it’s a mental health issue, our Forsyth students are getting little help there either, as extremist voices in our county have targeted programs that promote emotional intelligence in our kids and combat bullying. Across the country, as well as here in Forsyth, radical groups like Moms for Liberty have targeted programs that promote Social and Emotional Learning. Many Forsyth parents loved programs like the 7 Mindsets curriculum, which helped kids learn to regulate their emotions and replace negative self-talk with positive statements of growth. Isn’t the fact that in just a few weeks we’ve had a student bring a gun to school, and yet another student brought a knife onto the bus, evidence that our kids need more emotional support at school, not less? 

As Dr. Au said, “Children are a special class of people that need protection, which is why we have gates around pools, child-safe medication bottles, and car seats.” The Forsyth Dems are proud to support a slate of candidates who will put the safety of our children first by promoting common sense gun legislation, like Rep. Au’s Safe Storage Bill, that places the responsibility for gun safety where it belongs, on gun owners, coupled with more investment in our schools, not less.