Florida Board of Education Member Wants Students Carrying Guns

Around lunchtime on April 17, an FSU student and the stepson of a local sheriff's deputy walked onto the university's campus and opened fire with a handgun, killing two men and wounding six other people.

Robert Morales, a South Florida native and dining coordinator for FSU's department of dining services, and Tiru Chabba, a father from South Carolina who was at the university on a work-related visit, died in the violent rampage. Five of the six other victims have since been released from the hospital. Police have yet to reveal a motive for the shooting.

But while FSU students have since demanded that Florida's Republican-controlled legislature take action to curb gun violence in Florida in hopes of preventing the next mass shooting, one Florida Board of Education member has a different idea: arm teachers and students.

In an op-ed published today in the British conservative magazine The Spectator, Florida Board of Education member Daniel Foganholi argues that gun-free zones don't protect our students, but instead turn "them into defenseless, easy targets."

He believes that last week's tragedy at FSU might have ended differently if a trained professor, staff member, or "responsible student" had been packing heat.

"We owe our students, educators and staff more than empty promises and pointless legislation. We owe them their God-given right to self-defense," Foganholi writes. "Every student, teacher and staff member deserves to return home safely, every single day."

Last August, 38-year-old Foganholi was one of several Moms for Liberty-backed candidates soundly defeated in a Broward School Board election, for which he was running for a second term. But days after Broward voters rejected him,
DeSantis tapped him to serve on the Florida Board of Education, an unpaid post that has granted him oversight over K-12 education policies across the state.

A Coral Springs resident and onetime aspiring rapper (who, might we note, once shared a now-deleted music video depicting himself committing an armed robbery at a South Florida convenience store), Foganholi also serves on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission. He has yet to receive confirmation from the GOP-led Senate.

In his op-ed, Foganholi recalls the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting, during which a former student shot and killed 17 people and injured 17 others on Valentine's Day.

He notes how amid the chaos that day, athletic director Chris Hixon reportedly raced toward danger in his golf cart to help wounded students and save lives.

"Sadly, misguided policies forced [Hixon] to confront the shooter unarmed and he was shot dead," Foganholi writes. "Imagine if Hixon or even one teacher had carried a firearm that day. Imagine how differently things could have ended."

Despite Foganholi's proposal, polls have shown that most Americans don't love the idea of arming teachers.

According to a July 2024 report from Everytown, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control, decades of study of school shootings and law enforcement responses have shown that an armed teacher "cannot, in a moment of extreme duress and confusion, be expected to transform into a specially trained law enforcement officer."

"The notion of a 'highly trained' teacher armed with a gun is a myth," the report reads ... "An armed teacher is much more likely to shoot a student bystander or be shot by responding law enforcement than to be an effective solution to an active shooter in a school."

Foganholi didn't respond to New Times' request for comment when reached via text message.