Arming Teachers is a Bad Idea

by guest writer Sarah Terzo

Here are just a few reasons why teachers should not be armed with guns.

• If you are a policeman and you are called to an active shooter situation, and you see a stranger holding or pointing a gun, how will you know if it’s a teacher or the actual killer? It’s the perfect set up to get teachers killed. How will police even know whom to shoot at?
• I’ve read that trained police officers hit their target less than 30% of the time. With no training in marksmanship, it is not unlikely a teacher will miss their target and hit a student. Putting teachers through any kind of training takes time and money. The former teachers don’t have, and the later politicians refuse to give.
• When you are in a crisis situation and you catch a glimpse of someone with a gun, you might fire right away without hesitating. In that case, you might hit and kill one of the other teachers.

• Any kid at any time who gets angry and is troubled could potentially get a gun away from a teacher and shoot a bunch of people before anyone else could react. We might be providing them with the gun they didn’t think to bring. The teacher has to put the gun down, after all. They can’t just hold it all day and teach. Teachers have to write, they have to work visual aids, they have to grade papers. There will be multiple times every day when a student could grab a gun.
• Teachers themselves might occasionally be unstable. Something just crossed my feed about a teacher being busted for dealing meth. With no background check or evaluation, simply handing people guns doesn’t guarantee they will use the guns properly.
• Teachers did not sign on to be armed resisters. They signed on to be teachers. If they had wanted to be responsible for shooting people, they would have joined the army. It is an unfair responsibility to put on a teacher.
• Unless you give the teacher’s machine guns with bump stocks capable of firing multiple rounds in seconds, they will probably be outgunned anyway, because, like with Florida, the shooter has plenty of time to buy any gun he wants.
• The perpetrator has had weeks, months, or years to plan out the shooting. He has all the advantages. It is much more effective to stop the attack before it starts than to hope he hasn’t planned it well enough.

These are only a few reasons why this is a bad idea.

Is this REALLY a better solution than just not letting the kid have a gun to begin with?

image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/photos/machine%20gun/