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Notes -
The Colorado Gazette reports:
It's not clear if this was the actual intent: some of the Senators that sponsored that particular amendment claim that it wasn't, and they can credibly point to Democratic concerns that school resource officer funding being used to arm on-school police. Of course, the senators voicing concerns were the supposedly pro-gun side of the legislative debate; a different sponsor considered the entire bill "an exercise in sheer brute political force".
It's also not clear that matters. Legislative intent isn't exactly in vogue, and even if it were, the structure of judicial review for funding decisions make it exceptionally difficult for a challenge to survive first contact with the courts. Congress could change the law to be more specific... but I'd bet that they won't.
ESEA funds are not the whole source of funding for local schools and other covered groups, or even the sole source of federal funding. Schools that want to keep running archery and hunter education programs might be able to redistribute state spending from other matters, though they'll face extra scrutiny. Schools that don't will have a lot of reasons to absolutely smother these programs. And there's a lot more of the latter than the former.
I've spoken before about an older version of this problem, but it's also worth pointing out that, contemporaneously to the bill's discussion, this wasn't even on the list of concerns. But it seems interesting beyond that as a boring and trite example of the by-all-means war over institutions and culture, no matter the cost to civil trust.
It is the actual intent.
Liberal white women are afraid of guns, and want to ban all of them, to include hunting and sport firearms. You can't reason them out of this, because they didn't reason themselves into it.
They know the population, to include many Democrats, won't go for a total ban, so they keep slicing the salami. Ban a trigger guard here, an archery class there, and hopefully over the decades they'll end up with a total ban.
The Red Tribe has noticed the salami slicing, and has come to the conclusion that the only way we can survive is total unity - total opposition to any restriction on anything anywhere. We assume that any such legislation is proposed in bad faith, and oppose it.
While offering broad agreement, I will offer some slight pushback on this. Liberal women have not reasoned themselves into the fear of firearms, but I will say that I've had luck persuading a couple of them to be much less afraid by having a conversation about why I have guns and taking them shooting. You can't fix everything all at once, but people can be won over on guns by being a gun nut that isn't actually a nut.
Literally every single person I have ever taken shooting has gone at least 30% up the Overton Window towards gun rights after shooting them. Even the "guns should literally be forcibly confiscated from the entire populace" person moved up to "these are probably fine if reasonable checks are in place on issuing them".
This is interesting and I don’t doubt that you’re correct, but oddly enough this was the opposite of my experience with firing a gun. I’m ambivalent about gun control myself, and am certainly far from a gun-grabber, but I will say that my experience going shooting really drove home just how serious guns are and how important it is to line up incentives so that only competent and well-adjusted people end up owning them. I spent the entire time very cognizant of the fact that I had a deadly weapon in my hand and that if I did something incorrectly I could kill somebody with it.
I mean the counterpoint is that ‘lining up incentives so that only competent and well adjusted people end up owning them’ is the one outcome to the US gun debate that will literally never happen, even as it’s theoretically possible and just how things work in eg France and Czechia. The gun controllers are mostly more concerned with annoying the red tribe than keeping guns away from bad actors, civil rights lawyers will pounce on anything with a disparate impact, the red tribe hits defect on the issue because see #1, and few of the people in the gun policy space even care about the actually common bad outcomes.
I guess it's nice to fantasise that all your opponents can be easily dismissed because they just hate you, but that is almost never the case. ERPOs are precisely designed to help reduce the number of poorly-adjusted people with access to guns, but Republicans lose their shit about those too.
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