We Already Arm Teachers in Public Schools
By Rob Morse. February 25th, 2018
Article Original
After the murders in a Florida public high school, President Trump said we should allow some school staff to be armed. The Socialists were entirely predictable in the way they responded. They projected their personal fantasies onto armed teachers.
With one breath “progressives” said that school attacks were a new epidemic of dangerous proportions. Then they said that school shootings were so unlikely that an armed teacher would probably never be needed. “Progressives” said teaching is an honorable and valuable profession so teachers shouldn’t have to carry guns..but if we did let teachers go armed then they would probably go nuts and shoot someone.
We don’t have to fantasize about what will happen when school staff are armed. We already know how armed teachers behave. It is too easy to make fun of the talking heads, so let’s look at the facts instead.
10 states allow licensed gun owners to carry on college campuses. Some colleges in these states allow their staff to be armed and some prohibit it. In any case, no noteworthy increase in college campus shootings took place. You couldn’t guess or can’t remember which states allow armed college staff and which states forbid it.
After Sandy Hook, some places put more armed teachers in K to 12 schools, for roughly the same reason we put armed pilots in planes after the 911 attack. Even before the murders at Sandy Hook, well before the murders at Parkland, some states already allowed armed staff in K to 12 schools.
These school districts quietly sought teachers who had concealed carry licenses and were already carrying outside of school. For the record, No teacher has ever been ordered to carry a firearm in school. However, teachers who volunteered to carry at school, may be asked to take additional training.
That training costs money. Most districts haven’t put physical security into their budgets. Fortunately, a few private organizations train teachers, at no cost to the teachers or the schools.
In other words, training teachers is being accomplished
without school districts spending a dime.
Likewise, the firearms cost the school districts nothing. Teachers use their own firearms at school, the same one they are accustomed to carry outside of school. Each person has already chosen a firearm they are comfortable with, a gun that,
- fits their hand,
- they can conceal comfortably on their body,
- they have already trained with.
I’ve referred to teachers, but that is not the whole story. Not only teachers are armed in schools today. Bus drivers, custodians and school administrators are as well.
Why? Why do the training slots fill up as soon as they are advertised? Why do thousands of school staff members compete for hundreds of training slots?
Look at both the Sandy Hook and the Parkland attacks. Teachers used their bodies as human shields to protect their students. Teachers ran toward the sound of gunfire. They wanted to protect the people they loved at school the same way they protect the people they loved at home.
They want to be armed at school because they want what we want,
a chance for them and their students to survive.
Today, we don’t have to guess how staff would react if they carried a gun at school. We already know. These volunteers already knew their jobs with the school. They had already lived with a gun when they were off campus. We’ve accumulated many thousands of man-years and woman-years of experience with armed school staff. Call it dozens of lifetimes of real world wisdom. We get more experience every school day and it never makes the news.
The school staff carry concealed, and what is out of sight is out of mind. The sheriff and the school board knows. Parents and students don’t know which teachers are armed. More to the point, neither does a prospective attacker.
We know that teachers don’t go nuts when they carry on campus. Believe me, the media would have made sure we knew about that if it ever happened.
We don’t have to guess what happens when teachers are armed. We already know. The people you trust with your children live up to that trust..every single day.
Do you think we should have armed staff in schools?