Mercedes Schneider asks about the cost of arming teachers and about the liability assumed by teachers who are armed.
In the Florida program, teachers will be expected to have 132 hours of training, unpaid.
Who will pay for the guns? Where will they be kept during school? After school?
She wonders:
Is an armed teacher liable for failing to shoot an armed intruder? Is this a dereliction of duty, or will a teacher be excused, for example, for not having the heart to shoot one of her or his own students?
What if a student reaches for that gun, even if only out of curiosity?
What if a student gets possession of that gun? Don’t tell me it cannot happen.
Armed teachers become entangled in liability.
Who will insure them? Their school? Their district?
Paul Karrer, a retired teacher in California, asks about the ethical and practical questions of having guns in a school.
Kids want attention – some kid somewhere will bring a fake gun to school and a teacher will have to decide whether or not to shoot the kid. Ever seen any of the limitless phone videos of kids attacking teachers or substitute teachers? Giving the teacher a gun ups that ante a bit. Somewhere a teacher will forget her gun, (Like one of my cop friends does. Once he left it in a coffee shop. Another time he left it unlocked in his car. And at the shooting range he ricocheted a 9mm from his Glock into cement because he forgot it was loaded. This is a highly motivated trained cop. A bright guy, in his prime.)
Arming teachers is bad in every way. The solution is to limit gun access, not provide the gun manufacturing business with a new revenue stream – (Discussing School budget today -LINE ITEM 4- financial appropriation for weapon allotments – NO WAY!)
Should a teacher have to decide at some point to shoot a student? Should a teacher have to decide to shoot a parent? When the police arrive will they shoot the teacher holding the weapon? The variables are limitless, unforeseen, and all ugly. Teachers and teaching are in many ways sacred. Sacred in a similar vein as with a priest, rabbi, cleric, or pastor. Teachers also have a legal relationship to their students akin to attorney-client privilege — sworn to protect the child’s privacy at almost all costs. We can’t shoot them.
Not many teachers are likely to take up the offer of a gun. They know the risks.
Secure the campus. Let teachers teach.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I keep commenting (and wrote a column) pointing out perhaps the greatest absurdity. What makes anyone think guns in schools will keep school children safe when children don’t stay in school? Yesterday, hundreds of students in Hanover, NH marched to mail thousands of postcards to legislators. Marched. In the street. Closer together than in a classroom.
Students are outside schools at arrival and dismissal, in recess, on playgrounds, on field trips. The problem is easy availability of guns and people who are so desperate that they want to kill children. We have to fix those things, not arm teachers. The children will always be vulnerable and it is delusional to think that safety and security in school will prevent these tragedies.
No matter how many times I point this out, the debate returns to whether or not we should arm teachers, ignoring the reality that it wouldn’t help anyway . . . in addition to all the other reasons teachers shouldn’t be armed.
I led a school for 19 years and every single day there were multiple groups of students outside of the school building who would have been easy targets for a disturbed person with an automatic weapon.
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I’m not defending the wrong-headed concept of an armed teacher in every classroom when I mention that there is technology to link a specific firearm to the person that owns it so that firearm will not work for anyone else.
When that tech came out a few years ago, correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember that the NRA came out against it and that was the end of that safety feature. That tech also added a higher price tag to the firearm.
The trouble with even that high tech feature, once the round leaves the barrel, there’s no way to control who or what that round hits. Even an expert marksman can hit the intended target every time but what happens when the bullet goes through the intended target and hits unintended people and things behind the intended target?
There is a bullet for that too. It is a bullet that is designed to explode when it hits something so it will not pass through what it hits and hit something or someone else behind it, but that also comes with a danger because those bullets are like grenades when they explode inside the person it hits (lots of horrid damage) and there is no guarantee once a trigger is pulled that someone else will step in the path of that explosive round or a puff of wind will nudge it off track to hit a five-year-old or someone else that is innocent.
Arming our public schools’ employees is a bad idea no matter what.
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Arming teachers is even more stupid and dangerous than standardized testing.
And I don’t mean that facetiously in any fashion as standardized testing destroys many students’ desire to learn, labels them, many times for life, as they internalize that negative label, and gives false, misleading and completely invalid information about the student. Just as arming teachers will lead to false, misleading and completely deadly decisions being made by the teacher all of which is based on the false concept that we are “making the schools safer” in doing so.
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Agreed. Minority students will be at greater risk when the post shooting white teacher says just like the police, “I felt threatened.”
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Duane,
Spot on.
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POSTED AT :https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Schneider-and-Karrer-on-th-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Arming-Teachers_Diane-Ravitch-180310-341.html
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As a parent, I would not want to send my child to a potential battleground every day. I would not send my child to a school where weapons are accessible. If teachers are armed with guns, will the weapons be powerful enough to stand up to military-style weapons? The larger problems should be addressed. Mass shootings have occurred in concert venues, churches, etc. Shooters are not always under age 21; note Las Vegas shooter. Gun laws need to be created to control the most common element in mass shootings: weapons of war.
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Every time I read about the ludicrous idea of arming schoolteachers, I am certain that some politicians have lost their collective minds.
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I appreciate your comments, stevenelson0248 and Lloyd.
We all need to be informed about guns. I am no gun expert and have never handled a gun.
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Arming teachers is a morbid and ridiculous idea. There’s a loon in the WH.
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It’s complete (and brilliant, and sinister) misdirection and diversion from the real issue.
Instead of talking about how to limit access to weapons of mass murder, and more importantly, how to produce fewer mass murderers, we’re talking about arming teachers.
Trump is a political idiot savant: psychologically unstable, ignorant and incurious, yet almost never failing to get the rest of us to chase our tails politically.
Give the Devil his due, if you don’t want to be destroyed by him.
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