Moving past the question of whether it is the guns or the people behind the guns that kill people, the controversy at hand this time is about arming teachers in the classrooms. Buckeye Firearms Association presented a plan called “Armed Teacher Training Program,” and has since been implemented in 15 states.With the recent events in Connecticut, California, and previous shootings on school grounds, the question raised is whether teachers should be allowed to carry a handgun for safety precautions. At what point do we as citizens say yes, we can bring a potentially dangerous item into the environment in case of an emergency occurring?
Round Rock ISD put SROs on campuses to protect students not only from outside danger, but from one another. As the student body increased, it became more difficult to control. Was it teachers who were left with the job to stop violence, bullying and other dangerous situations? In short, no.
The role of a teacher in students’ lives is a role model, a passer of knowledge, and in lay terms, a shoo-er from danger, to make sure everyone is protected from danger. Think about those “stop-drop-and-roll” drills from elementary school. Was it the teachers who put out the fire? No, there were firefighters for that.
The role of an SRO at school is to implement the feeling of safety for students. If they did not walk the halls of McNeil every day, would there be violence going on? We can’t know for sure, but the fact that there are not fights every day says something. For the students who are on the verge of getting into trouble, sometimes all they need is a confident guidance from an officer in uniform.
If a shooting breaks out, SROs have the proper training needed to go in defense mode. This is the difference between handing a teacher a gun, and handing an officer a gun; the person with the lethal weapon needs to be 100 percent confident in what they will do with the gun in the case of real danger.
The weight of carrying a gun is more than a physical number, it is a responsibility, its own job. Consider the thought of giving every teacher a handgun. Who would take the job of getting students to safety? And say there are already armed SROs on campus, plus teachers with guns. From the officers’ perspective, how would they know who the bad guy(s) are(is)? Carrying a gun is a job in itself, and teachers do not need the added stress, or perhaps have the time needed to train for CHL (concealed handgun license) classes.
Weapon training is the key to using guns successfully. Officers dedicate their lives to physical training, and then target training several times a year. It is a full time job, and their bodies are eventually programed how to react to spontaneous danger. How could a teacher live two full time jobs without taking time away from one job. It is like multitasking: one cannot dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to both tasks at the same time. The risk of giving a gun to a teacher is not worth the even smaller risk of danger in a school.
Teachers should protect students, but they do not need to carry a gun on campus. The world in 2013 is just as violent as it was 200 years ago. According to the online historical newspapers, there are accounts of deaths every day in the crime report. People assume that now is the time to bring a gun to school because it is much more publicized now.
In reality, the chance of a shooting occurring in a school is about .0006 percent. This is figured by taking the number of mass shootings to happen in a school (35), dividing that by the number of grades (14), times the total number of students per grade in the world (4 million). While this is a small percentage, one might argue that it happens too often. This is true, violence should never happen.
Giving teachers guns is not the best solution. Security in the ways of preventing people from coming inside, or adding trained security should be implemented, rather than altering the role of a teacher, and creating even more danger than a situation without a gun.
