Lloyd Lofthouse was a Marine. He saw combat. Then he became a teacher. He is retired.

He explains here why it is a VERY bad idea to arm teachers:

”I woke up this morning remembering what it was like when I was teaching. There were students everywhere. Many arrived early in the morning and some were still around late at night. My classroom was surrounded by other classrooms full of students during the regular school day when a shooter might show up.

“If I had been armed with an automatic pistol and fired in any direction, I would have hit other classrooms with an average of 34 students in each one and a teacher and sometimes other adults helping the teacher or observing. No matter which way I fired a pistol, there would be another classroom and if the classroom wasn’t there, there were the streets with traffic and businesses and houses on the other side of those streets. People everywhere.

“Between classes, the halls were filled (packed is a better description) with students moving from one class to the next. Even trained as I was from the time I was a U.S. Marine, there would be no way to avoid hitting another student in that crowd even if I could identify the shooter. If there was a shooter, that crowd would be in a panic running everywhere. One shot from a pistol I carried, even if it hit the shooter could end up passing through the shooter and hitting a student behind them.

“If all the teachers are armed and several are shooting at the shooter if they can see the shooter and there are others all around in a panic, the death toll and wounded could end up much higher.

“How could any teacher live with that for the rest of their lives — that they fired on a shooter but missed and hit another child and/or that they hit the shooter but also took out one or more children behind the shooter?

“What happens to the teachers then — will they be lauded as heroes or crucified as careless killers?

“No matter how much one trains to become a skilled shooter, there is no one, I repeat, no one, not even the best snipers in the military that don’t miss their target and hit something else to either side or behind it without hitting the target.

”Once you pull that trigger, that round is going to go somewhere with no guarantee that you will hit what you wanted to hit. Even if you shoot straight up into the sky, that bullet will eventually come back down and hit the earth or something/someone else.”