I am a teacher. I know and am friends with dozens of teachers. Trust me, you do not want teachers with guns.<\/strong><\/p>\nThis brief post gathered more likes and comments\u2014mostly from fellow teachers\u2014than any Facebook message I had ever posted. The unanimous consensus, not surprisingly, was that the very thought of arming teachers is ludicrous and a non-starter. The same sentiment was shared by the dozen or so colleagues whom I joined for a Friday afternoon beer at our on campus watering hole a couple of days later. One colleague reported that one of his students said that the possibility of his professor being armed would make him think twice about skipping class; we quickly lost count of all the reasons that arming teachers a bad idea.<\/p>\n
Most of the push back in the media and elsewhere, understandably, has involved pointing out the dozens of practical problems that such a proposal would raise if anyone actually tried to put it into action. Who pays? Who trains? Where are the guns stored? What is the pay differential? Wouldn\u2019t this money be better spent on badly needed supplies and resources that would actually help teachers? And so on. As befits a philosopher, I suppose, I\u2019ll leave the practical problems for others to discuss. My own resistance has to do with the very nature of learning environments. The proposal to arm teachers, if enacted, would clearly reveal our society\u2019s values and what we consider to be of primary importance. And the picture revealed is a very sad and ugly one.<\/p>\n
A frequent text that I use in many of my classes is Cormac McCarthy\u2019s 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road<\/em>. In a post-apocalyptic world, an unnamed father and son wander through a close-to-dead landscape covered in ash, several years after an unnamed cataclysm (Nuclear holocaust? Meteor strike?) ended human civilization. The father and his son are hungry, close to starving, scrounging to find whatever sustenance they can as they wander south through the ash-covered former American southeast. The majority of human beings remaining have reverted to cannibalism in order to stay alive, something that the young boy, who has never known a world other than the nightmarish one he was born into, regularly talks about with his father.<\/p>\nWe wouldn\u2019t ever eat anybody, would we?<\/strong><\/p>\nNo, of course not.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nEven if we were starving?<\/strong><\/p>\nWe\u2019re starving now.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nYou said we weren\u2019t.<\/strong><\/p>\nI said we weren\u2019t dying. I didn\u2019t say we weren\u2019t starving.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nBut we wouldn\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 .<\/strong><\/p>\nNo. We wouldn\u2019t.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nNo matter what.<\/strong><\/p>\nNo. No matter what.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nBecause we\u2019re the good guys.<\/strong><\/p>\nYes.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nAnd we\u2019re carrying the fire.<\/strong><\/p>\nAnd we\u2019re carrying the fire.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nOkay.<\/strong><\/p>\nOne of the many moral themes of the novel is \u201cWhat are you willing to do to stay alive?\u201d From deep within, the young boy recognizes that if there is any value to human life, it lies in a categorical rejection of fear-based behavior. There are some things that must not be done, even if one\u2019s own survival is at stake.<\/p>\n
Although the circumstances are obviously different, the national \u201cconversation\u201d about gun violence has reached a point that is comparable to the situation faced by the boy and his father in The Road<\/em>. Throughout the novel, the boy regularly confirms with his father that they are some of the \u201cgood guys\u201d who are \u201ccarrying the fire,\u201d the \u201cfire\u201d essentially being the ember of decency and humanity left in a world that contains little of either. I can\u2019t help but be reminded of one of the NRA\u2019s favorite claims, a \u201ctruism\u201d shared regularly by gun advocates on social media: \u201cTo stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.\u201d But what if, in order to preserve the very idea of \u201cgood guy,\u201d we must identify what things \u201cgood guys\u201d will not do, even out of fear, even when they believe their very survival is threatened?<\/p>\nI am a teacher, and I understand that my thoughts on guns in the classroom are anything but objective, but I believe that classrooms, the places in which human beings teach and learn, are sacred spaces\u2014\u201csacred\u201d not in the religious sense that many believe to be the only meaning of the word, but \u201csacred\u201d because the classroom is where, if anywhere, we \u201ccarry the fire\u201d and pass it from person to person, from generation to generation. It is one of the places where everyone, for a time, gets to be \u201cthe good guys\u201d in a world in which the number of places where goodness can happen seems to be decreasing on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
To argue that the challenges of gun violence are best met by introducing more guns into the equation, this time into the very environments in which we seek to fan the fire of knowledge and humanity into a brighter flame, to propose that the best solution to gun violence in schools is to arm teachers, is to say \u201cwe give up.\u201d Or at least to say \u201cwe would rather sacrifice the sanctity of our most precious environments of goodness than seriously consider limiting our supposed freedom to do whatever the hell we want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is there anything we will not do in order to create the appearance of greater safety? Is there no line beyond which we will not go, a line that marks \u201cthis far, but no further\u201d in our attempts to define what \u201cgood guys\u201d will and will not do? It may be that you, the reader, are willing to try anything in the pursuit of safety and security\u2014except, of course, sensible and enforceable limitations on gun ownership. I am not. I recall Socrates\u2019 response to his friend Crito as he explains why he will not escape from prison even though he can. \u201cThere is a difference, Crito, between living and living well.\u201d There are, in other words, some lives that are not worth living. Similarly, there are some societies that I would rather not live in. A society with armed teachers is one of them.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my ethics class last Thursday we began our final unit of the semester: Gun violence. First up was an essay by Simone Gubler called \u201cPhilosophizing with Guns.\u201d She wrote it while she was a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Texas, reflecting on a Texas \u201ccampus carry\u201d bill signed into law a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":11462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[946,32,39,48,73,75,76,83,94],"tags":[222,233,383,388,463],"class_list":["post-36074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid-19","category-evil","category-friends","category-human-nature","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-power","category-sacrament","category-teaching","tag-family","tag-friends","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n