The “debate” about arming teachers to prevent school shootings would be laughable if the topic was not so serious. The premise is lazy blame-shifting by “leaders” either totally bereft of an original thought or kowtowing to special interests. Or both.
I am reminded of a scene in the 2000 movie Traffic. The new drug czar, played by Michael Douglas, convenes a meeting with his new staff and asks for any, any ideas on how to solve the drug trafficking issues plaguing the country.
The scene plays out in uncomfortable silence for many, many seconds.
Two decades later, amidst our opioid crisis, I imagine the scene would realistically play out the same way.
Today, I picture our “leaders” sitting in a room brainstorming for ideas to stop school shootings, and the best they can come up with is “arm teachers”?
Just how many social problems have American public schools been asked to solve over the last four decades through legislative “action”, usually in the form of unfunded mandates. Bullying? Teach anti-bullying classes. Drug abuse? Make sure you include anti-drug curriculum and form a SAP team. Dating violence? Curriculum. Obesity? Curriculum and cafeteria policies. School shootings? Let the education community solve that for us too.
A 2011 paper by Stanford’s David Larabee begins, “In modern societies, we ask schools to fix an enormous variety of social problems, both large and small.”
Later, he hits the motivation on the head: “…asking schools to fix problems is a lot easier than trying to address the problem directly through the political system.”
Problems like school shootings.
Professionals who carry guns can serve as cautionary tales. In 2012 New York City police infamously shot nine bystanders during an incident in Manhattan.
How could that happen? This from a study reported in Time: “According to a 2008 RAND Corporation study evaluating the New York Police Department’s firearm training, between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate during gunfights was just 18 percent. When suspects did not return fire, police officers hit their targets 30 percent of the time.”
The piece goes on to say: “In an article for TIME last year, Amanda Ripley looked at what happens in the brain and body when shots are fired. The brain stem sends out signals that cause blood vessels to constrict and hormones to surge. Studies have shown that eyesight becomes narrower (literally tunnel vision) under such conditions. People who have been in gunfights describe hearing very little and perceive time slowing down. Amid this chaos, as police officers have to make difficult, split-second decisions, humans can lose motor skills as the body reverts to basic fight or flight instincts.”
As we know now, the armed professional assigned to Stoneman Douglas apparently froze in the face of reality and did not follow his active shooter protocols, but remained outside the building for four minutes.
These are trained law enforcement professionals, not amateur gun carriers, like a teacher. And that’s what a teacher will be, no matter how many monthly trainings he/she must go to.
A gun carrying teacher is supposed to react calmly and accurately to a gun carrying bad guy in a crowded classroom, a packed hallway between classes, a cafeteria at lunch time?
What about unanticipated effects? We have suicide-by-cop. Would a depressed teen, on a particularly bad day, pull a gun or gun facsimile in a classroom to bait a teacher into shooting? Suicide-by-teacher.
In hiring a new teacher, would marksmanship count more than knowledge of subject matter and/or experience?
While all modern teachers rehearse for active shooting incidents, even though Donald Trump finds that term off-putting, nobody goes into education because he/she is proficient in firearms.
Inevitably, unless we continue to call BS on our puppet politicians, we will have more school shootings, maybe a shooting in a school that has armed teachers. Maybe they will make a difference and stop potential carnage. Maybe not. Maybe they’ll hit innocent bystanders.
The expectation that armed teachers are the solution to school shootings is a symptom of willful blindness and cowardice.
It is BS.
The Q-View 