Teachers packing pistols to protect their students—an idea so desperate and unserious it’s clear the crowd that keeps bringing it up is more worried about optics than real options for stopping these awful school shootings.
First of all, under the good-teacher-with-a-gun scenario some kind of shootout with the bad guy would be inevitable. But if you talk to folks who’ve actually been in a firefight they will tell you learning how to hit a stationary target and handle your weapon is just the beginning. You’ve got to have a warrior mindset to stay calm and shoot straight when things are going crazy around you. We don’t know for sure that no teachers have that mindset, but we do know even some soldiers fall apart when the bullets start flying. And teachers are people who expressly did not sign up to be soldiers.
Secondly, while school shootings are far too common in this country they’re still actually pretty rare. So thankfully the vast majority of schools will never have one. That means thousands of teachers with thousands of guns would very likely spend decades toting them around and never have cause to use them, which leaves an awful lot of time for a distracted teacher to misplace a weapon or even for an unruly student to steal one. That only has to happen once to make everyone deny they were ever in favor of this idea.
And think on this: All of the politicians casually talking about guns in the classroom–from the President on down to state lawmakers—most all of them work in buildings where guns are completely banned except for armed guards or police officers. They’re not saying you and I or the guy who cleans up can bring in a gun as long as our mental health is good, or if we’ve undergone a background check or had some training. No. They say guns in the hands of professionals ONLY because they want to be safe.
So, let’s be real: This idea of the courageous teacher taking out the evil school shooter sure sounds nice, like a Hollywood movie. But in real life its unlikely to play out so neatly, and could quite easily do more harm than good. We now need serious proposals to help keep our kids safe. And giving guns to teachers just isn’t one of them.