Last train to Clarksville

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about an idiot legislator (sorry, that's all-too-often redundant):

Jeremy Hutchinson, a Republican state senator from Arkansas, is one voice in an NRA-led chorus of those who want to see armed teachers in his state's classrooms. Only days after the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Hutchinson proposed deputizing teachers who wanted to carry guns at work. Just yesterday, he continued to advocate for an Arkansas school district to be allowed to move forward with a plan to arm about twenty teachers, administrators, and other staff this fall. Apparently, nothing will change his mind, as this embarrassing, are-you-sure-there-isn't-a-lesson-in-there anecdote uncovered by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette suggests (emphasis mine):

Senator Jeremy Hutchinson, a Republican from Benton, is interested in exploring whether state law allows school districts to make decisions on school safety. If a legal avenue does not exist, he hopes the legislature will change the law.
After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Hutchinson became interested in arming school personnel, he said. He was invited to attend an "active shooter" training and— using a rubber bullet-loaded pistol— he mistakenly shot a teacher who was confronting a "bad guy".
The experience gave Hutchinson some pause, but he still supports giving schools the authority to decide how best to secure their campuses. "The ideal would be to have a trained resource officer in every school," Hutchinson said. "The state and school districts can’t afford that."

It's unclear from the article what prompted Hutchinson to share the story of the training session gone wrong, although it was noticeably absent from a press release sent out earlier this year by one of his fellow Republican colleagues who had attended the same event. "It was intense, enlightening, and, when we weren’t being shot, it was fun," Hutchinson was quoted as saying in that release. "I learned how little I knew about school safety."
Late last month, Arkansas' Clarksville School District announced plans to use something of a legal loophole to begin training and arming school staff by classifying them as private security guards. That plan, however, ran into trouble early this month when the state attorney general said that the law they were using to do that didn't apply to school districts, leaving it uncertain whether armed teachers will be in Clarksville classrooms this fall. A state board is set to decide the matter next month.
While Clarksville is using the guard classification to work around state law, several other states have passed legislation clearing the way for teachers and staff to arm themselves. Those efforts, as The New York Times explained last month, have run into a major hurdle in the form of insurance companies.

Rico says ah, it's always the insurance... (But for those of a certain age, like Rico, that song will always echo, unfortunately, in our memories.)