Should we allow teachers to protect their classrooms with a gun? We should be allowing teachers to protect herself or himself and the 10-20 other lives in their classroom with an approved handgun, and a thorough mental health screening. I do not think a teacher should be required to have one, but it should be an option if they would like further protection for their classroom. It is a right given to us in the Bill of Rights that we can bare arms and I find that there is no better way to carry out that right than to use it to protect others.
Think back to the awful Sandy Hook shooting of 2012. Do you think 27 people would have died that day if just one teacher had been able to protect the school with their own fire arm? I do not have any children of my own, but I would be worried sick daily if I knew I was sending my child to school and their teacher had absolutely no way of protecting them other than locking the door and hiding in the corner. What good does that do? The number of school shootings would significantly decrease if a shooter knew that there were armed teachers in the building. Schools are targets. It’s a bunch of people, confined in one space with no way to protect themselves other than turning some lights off, locking doors and hiding in the corner. That does not seem to be stopping shooters. We need to take action and stop playing victims. We need to allow teachers to protect themselves and their classrooms if they feel comfortable.
So how do we carry this out? How do we make sure teachers are ready and properly prepared to have a gun in their classroom? First and foremost, I believe a mental health screening is most important. We need to make sure these teachers are mentally stable and prepared for the responsibility that comes with handling a gun. Second, there should be extensive and proper training on how to handle, work with, and shoot a gun. Gun safety classes are the second most important step in allowing a teacher to have a gun in their classroom. We must make sure that they are extremely knowledgeable about the safety and significance of having a gun in a school. Third, they should stay in a safe at all times, so that it is ensured that only the approved teachers have access to the weapon. I believe that these are the top 3 most important things we must do so that teachers may have a gun to protect their classroom.
Allowing teachers to carry in schools is a significant and vital step to protect the children and stop more school shootings from happening. Just as having a gun in your home is optional, teachers should have the option to protect themselves and their students throughout the school day. It would deter many potential school shooters and I believe that is an important step in completely eliminating school shootings.
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ReplyDeleteAt the start of your blog I began thinking this would be just another rant about how teachers should be allowed to carry weapons at schools to protect the children and themselves from school shooters. After I finished reading, I could see that you gave this topic much thought and created a plan on how to execute the idea of having armed teachers in school. I have children who attend school and the thought of a possible school shooting happening where they attend crosses my mind often. Although having armed teachers to protect them seemed like a good start to combat the possibility, I was still skeptical on how I or anyone could trust teachers to carry a gun on campus just because we assumed, they’d protect our children. What if the teacher isn’t capable of that responsibility? What if it is a teacher with permission to carry who does the shooting next time? What if a student gets to the teacher’s weapon? How do we control those outcomes? Your plan to have mental health screenings, extensive and proper training, and the suggestion of how to keep the weapons secure and safe gave me the feeling that there is a possibility it could work. With more detail and information on how this plan could be executed, I agree that these could be important steps towards making schools safer.
ReplyDeleteThis article by my colleague Juliet makes the case that teachers should be allowed to have guns in their classrooms to protect themselves and their students from the dangers of school shooters. Although Juliet’s argument is somewhat misinformed, she brings attention to a large issue that needs to be fixed.
ReplyDeleteJuliet’s argument in full is that many school shootings could be averted if teachers had the right to keep firearms in their classrooms. Her suggestion is that all teachers would have to have a rigorous mental health screening before being allowed to have a weapon. This brings a few questions to mind. Would you have to go through a mental health test to become a teacher? This would decrease the wish for people to attempt to get this already underpaid job. How would screening be done? How can you safely keep the weapons, in a way so that the children cannot access them, but it be readily accessible?
Based on the number of schools in the U.S., the average number of school days in a year, and the average number of shootings per year, there is a 1 in 1.8 million chance of a school shooting on any given day. With 3.6 million teachers in the U.S., unless we make arming teacher mandatory, that is low odds that a teacher with a firearm will be at the right place at the right time to avert the school shooting. The risk, however, outweighs the reward substantially. Children under age 12 die from gun accidents in the United States about once a week, on average, so it would not make sense to bring a gun into the classroom. To add to that, suicide is the leading cause of death among teens, and firearm suicide accounts for 51% of attempted suicide. Why put a suicide tool in a classroom?
There are two ways to improve the problem of school shootings. The first way is to make guns harder to get/keep hold of. Wills are public documents, so we can track who gets the firearms of the deceased. That way we can screen the inheritor to make sure that they can have a firearm. All licenced gun dealers are required keep sales records forever, and because of that, we can make sure that we know who has ever purchased a gun legally. We can tighten security for who can buy a new gun, and take the new security to inheritors of firearms. If we tighten security on who can have a gun, and instead of it being give the firearm dealer a reason why a person shouldn’t have a firearm, make it give them a reason why a person should. We would also probably have a database for all firearm dealers to check identities so that we can see how many firearms a person has.
The other solution is to give more counseling funds to schools, and funding to have therapists on call. This would attempt to fix not only the problem of school shootings, but it would also decrease the number of suicides by young people. By giving young people access to therapy and counseling, we will give them ways to fix their problems without going off the deep end and attempting to kill people.
Although arming teachers might decrease the likelihood of school shootings, there are better and less dangerous ways to keep school shootings from happening. If we do our best, we can fix the problems without making more problems for ourselves.