Let professors and students carry guns on campus, Florida board of ed member says

MIAMI — In the wake of the devastating mass shooting at Florida State University last week, former Broward County School Board member and current Florida Board of Education member Daniel Foganholi calls for a controversial solution: allowing students and professors to carry guns on campus.

Foganholi, a Republican from Coral Springs, published an opinion piece in conservative British magazine The Spectator on Wednesday arguing that “gun-free zones do not protect our students – they turn them into defenseless, easy targets.”

The recent shooting at one of Florida's largest universities sent shockwaves throughout the state and brought back traumatizing memories of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, in which a former student killed 17 people and injured 17 others. In fact, several students who survived the 2018 shooting attend FSU.

“When sick individuals like the shooter at FSU attempt to terrorize campuses, they deserve swift and decisive confrontation by anyone capable of stopping them,” Foganholi writes in the op-ed. “In other words, they deserve to be shot dead on the spot.”

On April 17, a gunman killed two people and wounded several others at Florida State in Tallahassee. Within five minutes of the first shot, the 20-year-old suspect, the step-son of a sheriff’s deputy, was shot by police and taken into custody. Police say the gunman used his stepmother’s handgun in the attack.

Foganholi is an ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration, which has appointed him to education-related positions five times. He was first appointed to the Broward County School Board in May 2022 to fill a seat vacated by Rosalind Osgood, who stepped down to run for the state Senate. Jeff Holness was elected to that seat in November 2022. DeSantis appointed Foganholi to the school board again just a month later to fill another vacant seat. In 2023, Foganholi was appointed to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission and the Charter School Review Commission while he still served on the school board.

Foganholi ran in the August 2024 election to keep his seat, but came in third place in a three-way race won by Maura Bulman. That election cemented the Broward County School Board’s liberal majority, which reflects Broward’s status as the only Democratic stronghold in South Florida following the 2024 presidential election. (The school board’s lone conservative member, Brenda Fam, announced her resignation Tuesday, citing a “toxic environment.”)

Just three days after his defeat, DeSantis appointed Foganholi to serve on the State Board of Education, which sets state education policy and enforces education laws.

In the op-ed in The Spectator, Foganholi describes visiting FSU’s campus days before the shooting, watching students socialize and read on the lawn. “Today, that same lawn is a crime scene – the latest gun-free zone targeted by a coward intent on terrorizing innocent lives,” he wrote.

“At FSU, the shooter used his mother’s legally-owned service weapon. No law could have stopped him,” Foganholi wrote. “But, had even one trained professor, staff member or responsible student been armed, this tragedy might have ended differently.”

‘Should everybody on campus have a weapon?’

Foganholi referenced other high-profile school shootings in his argument, including the Parkland shooting, when Chris Hixon, a Navy veteran and school athletic director, rushed to help wounded students. Hixon, who was unarmed, was murdered by the gunman.

“Imagine if Hixon or even one teacher had carried a firearm that day. Imagine how differently things could have ended,” Foganholi wrote.

Debra Hixon, the Broward County School Board chair and Chris Hixon’s wife, told the Herald that while she agrees with some of Foganholi’s points, she disagrees with the idea that allowing students and teachers to have weapons on campus would make everyone safer in an emergency. She said more guns on campus, potentially in the hands of young, impulsive people, would cause more harm than good.

“You can flip the conversation. Let’s say there were five students around the shooter, untrained, nervous as all get out,” Hixon said. “They throw out their weapons. They could’ve killed more people. The idea that people just carrying guns all over the place makes things safer, I just think is a not an accurate statement.”

Debra Hixon did agree that if her husband had a gun, things would’ve ended much differently. In his lifetime, Chris Hixon did agree with the idea of trained staff being armed in schools. If he were alive today, Debra Hixon said, he would’ve opted into the state’s Guardian Program, which was enacted after the Parkland shooting and named after Chris. But, as Hixon noted, her husband was a veteran with active shooter training, not “just someone who went and got a gun.”

“I never opposed the guardianship program. I think it’s important. But should everybody on campus have a weapon?” she said. “Just think about road rage, right? Someone cuts you off. The next thing you know, they’re whipping out a gun and shooting at people. That’s not the world I want to live in.”

Historically, Americans have been divided over how to best address school shootings, including gun reform or arming school faculty. In 2017, a year before the Parkland shooting, data from Pew Research Center showed that Americans “narrowly opposed” allowing teachers to carry guns. A majority of Americans say it is too easy to legally obtain a gun and 58% of Americans support stricter gun laws, though specific gun policies are politically divisive, according to 2023 Pew data.

David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, outspoken gun control advocate and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, told CBS News that the FSU shooting highlights the need for stronger gun laws. He criticized the efforts of some Republicans in the Florida Legislature to roll back gun reforms that were made after the Parkland shooting.

“There are a lot of students from Parkland at FSU, and what really bothers me is, in Florida, we worked in a bipartisan manner to pass reforms after Parkland,” he told CBS’s Major Garrett. “We passed a red flag law that has been used over 19,000 times to disarm people who were a risk to themselves and others.”

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