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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.
What makes you say so? If you assume that the intent of all firearms legislation is to antagonize political enemies, you will rarely be surprised the text of the bills or the outcomes thereof. If you try to figure out how the legislation is expected to stop bad things from happen, you'll frequently wind up puzzled by how anyone could think that's going to work. Surely there haven't been any mass bow attacks of late! Bolt-action rifles aren't exactly the ideal choice for school shootings. Passing legislation that results in doing away with helpful, pro-social hunting and marksmanship programs seems unambiguously bad, unless the goal is to antagonize political enemies, in which case it seems almost perfectly well-suited to the task.
The goal is fewer hunters and making it harder to enter the sport.
Then this is a stupid way to go about that. Hunting is mostly transmitted generationally or through person to person old boys networks, and hunting classes in schools have zippo to do with it. This makes it harder to transmit hunting generationally, but no serious person thinks it actually prevents it(and even while democrats mostly don’t like the kind of people who hunt, they generally don’t want them to actually stop hunting), it’s simply a pain in the ass.
Enough pains in the ass, and you can reduce the number of hunters in the next generation to the point where you can ban it (or its implements) entirely.
The actual end result is that instead of taking hunter's ed classes in school, kids have to go to bass pro shop on an evening or a weekend, which is not a deterrent to serious hunters. It is merely annoying. You can do things to make hunting even more annoying, and democrats mostly don't do them. Public hunting land remains open, including federal land, and hunter's ed requirements aren't getting any longer or less... geared towards their obvious target audience.
And there are functionally no hunters lukewarm enough to be deterred by taking some classes at a sporting goods store with their sons instead of having their son’s school do it. It’s already an opt in activity requiring up-front investment.
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