An MTA bus displays “masks required” on July 4, 2020, in New York City. | Noam Galai/Getty Images

Mask enforcement won’t work without education.

Though 33 states now have face mask mandates, Gov. Pete Ricketts says his state of Nebraska will not be joining them. On Monday, Ricketts doubled down on his conviction that a statewide mask mandate would be too “heavy-handed.”

“I don’t want to make it a crime,” he said at a press conference.

Ricketts’s resistance comes as his office is challenging mask ordinances in Lincoln and Lancaster County that have already gone into effect. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, have called his failure to pass a statewide mask order a “dereliction of duty.”

“I would die for my students. Please don’t make me,” read a teacher’s sign at a recent protest across from Ricketts’s office.

Teachers from across the metro are