I know the advocates will say that plan to screen out “those type” of teachers, but no screening program is perfect. And I put this in MPSIMS on purpose, because I have no intention in getting into a generic gun debate. Just that this news item could not have come at a better/worse time depending on where you are on the issue of guns for teachers.
And what about incompetence?
Just yesterday, I told my students “If they arm me, I can guarantee if there’s an incident, I’ll either accidentally take out a ceiling tile… or one of you.”
My co-worker’s nephew was in the classroom next door when this happened.
Tell me again how arming teachers will solve things.
Depends on what you’re trying to solve. If it’s a shortage of armed teachers barricading themselves inside schools, then I’d say this proposal has definite potential.
This is why teachers need to receive proper training in handling guns in school. So that they don’t waste rounds.
A lot of the comments on the Facebook news story are saying this is fake news, and nothing but a liberal ploy to discredit arming teachers
:rolleyes:
”One shot, one kill”: the motto of USMC Sniper Scouts and soon the National Education Association Force Recon Detachment Alpha. “No child left behind”, will take a literal meaning. Teachers are going to trade in the three ‘R’s for ‘CSM’: “Celer, Silens, Mortalis”. Hey, at least it is bringing Latin back into schools.
Meanwhile, West Virginia still can’t provide affordable health insurance for teachers. But, hey, you have to have your priorities.
Stranger
How is Facebook anything but a punchline at this point?
My Mother was a teacher for severely handicapped children. She’s the most kind, gentle, pacifist person I know. Last Sunday she said that if she had been armed as a teacher she would have murdered someone sooner or later. It’s a high stress job.
It’s not fake news, but it is a story of a person who apparently is suffering from mental issuesand brought a gun to the workplace. His workplace happened to be a school. To try and politicize this as having to do with arming teachers is disingenuous at best. This case, like most others of it’s ilk, involve a person who has, for whatever reason, become mentally unstable. There are almost always signs, but they can be difficult to piece together except in hindsight.
It’s not. But it’s fun to laugh at 
also, I share pictures to my friends and family.
Silly idea. Arm the students instead.
How is it “disingenuous” to look upon this incident and not question the sensibility or safety of allowing or requiring teachers to bring firearms into classrooms, notwithstanding of how students may respond to it? The proposal, such as it is, to “arm teachers” has not addressed any of the wide number of logistical, training, oversight, and basic safety issues, such as how teachers are certified to be competent to carry a firearm in school, how the weapon is to be safely and securely stored when not on the teacher’s body, and who will oversee and intervene in the case of teachers who are not emotionally stable to be trusted with a firearm in the classroom. Does the school maintain a shootbox for administrative unloads of the weapons at the end of each day as many police departments and private security firms do?
Police departments have policies for all of these concerns as well as some minimum level of training and competency requirements, and even they often struggle with misuse, negligent discharge, and emotionally unstable employees. Are school administrators supposed to recruit and employ a “Weapon Faciliator” in each school in addition to all of the other administrative, disciplinary, financial, educational, and extracurricular responsibilities? In a time when public schools are cutting back (and private charter schools are cutting corners), restricting or eliminating cost of living salary increases and providing increasingly inadequate health care plans, who is going to pay for the facilities and oversight?
This proposal is a poorly thought out attempt to avoid the discussion about how to limit access to firearms by mentally unstable people or restricting certain functional classes of weapons to people who have a demonstrated competence and need, with no consideration or concession to expense, difficulty, or additional hazard it would pose versus hiring additional security guards or providing police protection against shootings, notwithstanding the fact that the authorities failed to enforce current strictures upon the shooter from his previous behavior and the officers immediately onsite appear to have done fuck all to stop the shooter or protect students and teachers in the school. And dismissing this incident because ‘it’s just one crazy teacher’ is neglecting the fact that this is the entire problem; we don’t seem to be able to do anything about the emotionally unstable people with access to firearms who elect to shoot up a school, concert, or church.
Stranger
Yeah, because once you arm the “good teachers”, you are guaranteed that none will every become unstable. And the more “good teachers” you arm, the less likely there will be some unstable ones who slip thru the cracks.
Let’s just say that, in general, it’s never a good idea to purposely arm a bunch of workers in any workplace. It doesn’t matter if the workplace is a school, Google, or the post office. Oops. Did I say post office? Unless that workplace is something like the army or the police…
This incident could have happened anywhere, in any workplace. It has absolutely nothing to do with “arming teachers”. The fact that he was a teacher is coincidental. This was (another) case of a mentally unstable person who had many prior indicators of that instability being overlooked by authorities - both in law enforcement and his employer - and family.
Is your point is that the teaching profession includes some mentally unstable people? Guess what, so does law enforcement. This incident points out, again, that we as a society have no ide how to balance individual rights against metal illness - regardless of age or profession.
It has everything to do with the proposal to allow teachers to keep firearms in the classroom because it very clearly highlights a problem that has to be addressed if this proposal is to be taken seriously; namely, how school administrators are going to develop and execute policies to assure that allowing teachers to possess weapons is not going to be a greater hazard than the still rare (although all too frequent) school shootings. In occupations where carrying a weapon is a requirement of the job–police, military, private security–there are extensive policies which mandate where and how weapons may be carried, the storage and administrative requirements, periodic training and evaluation to assure competence, and oversight to detect emotional problems or instability before it turns into a violent confrontation. I cannot think of a single valid reason why we would not want to apply at least the same standards of competence and stability to people who are specifically authorized to carry a weapon to defend schools as we would for police.
Here, for instance, is the California Police Officers Standard of Training (POST) requirement for the Arrest and Firearms Course which is considered the minimum standard in the state of California for a police officer (Active Duty Patrol or Reserve Officer Level I) to carry a duty firearm without direct supervision by a Training Officer. Most agencies at least double this requirement to certify a prospective officer to carry a firearm not including additional training with unarmed and less-than-lethal methods, weapon retention, conflict deescalation and resolution, and other techniques to minimize the potential that using a weapon in the course of duty is necessary. It is widely if not universally acknowledged that teachers are already underpaid, often not provided with adequate resources, and expected to work far in excess of the hours they are in the classroom, and that many school systems are stretched thin to just provide basic learning materials and classroom space. Who would pay for extra training, secure weapon storage, and the additional administrative overhead to assure that some kind of minimum standard is being met to prevent additional violence from unstable teachers? Or is your proposal to just let any teacher who so desires to carry any weapon they like in any way they prefer in the classroom, and if a few unstable individuals who “happen to be” teachers threaten students and coworkers, that is just the price we pay for living in a uniquely ‘free society’? Because–and I say this as someone with a lot of experience with firearms and an advocate for responsible gun ownership–that’s just really fucking stupid, even on today’s scale of fucking stupidity. That is like suggesting that the answer to car accidents is to raise the speed limit and remove licensing requirements.
As for the claim that “we as a society have no ide how to balance individual rights against metal illness,” this is so utterly wrong I’m not sure that you’re even living on the same planet as the rest of humanity. American law has long recognized that people who are emotionally unstable or lack mental competence may be restrained from possessing and using any of a variety of hazardous items or engaging in activities which may endanger others. It is true that we often don’t recognize or address significant mental illness until the sufferer does something that cannot be ignored, but no rational person would argue that we should give a suicidal person a gun or permit with demonstrated violent dissociative tendencies access to weapons. This is such a completely bullshit attempt at equivocation to avoid having to acknowledge that across the demographic of teachers there are many people who we should not trust to carry firearms in a classroom, and that this specific instance is an unambiguous example of such, that I’m morally certain you have no intention of engaging in an honest discussion about effective and practical strategies to protect schools from mass shooting and other violence, whether it is added security personnel and features or stricter regulation on the purchase of weapons.
Stranger
I thought we were trying to solve a drop off in gun sales since the Cheeto Benito was elected.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
It’s a serious problem. Without gun-grabbin’ 'Bama in the White House, it’s hard to fearmonger people into buying guns and ammunition by the truckload. Oh, you say that Obama didn’t ban any guns? That he called for more stringent background checks and mental health services to prevent more mass shootings and firearm-related violence? That he actually said, “I believe in the Second Amendment, there written on paper, that guarantees the right to bear arms. No matter how many times people try to twist my words around, I taught constitutional law. I know a little bit about this. But I also believe that we can find ways to reduce gun violence consistent with the Second Amendment.”
Must be some of that ‘fake news’ I keep hearing Fox & Friends go on about.
Stranger
Yeah, that’s true. Arming large portions of plumbers or food service people is also a fucking stupid idea.
There are lots of issues around arming teachers in the classroom, this incident is not one of them, period. This man could have been in any profession with the exact same result. That fact that this man was a teacher had NO bearing on what actually happened. He locked himself in an “office” and, probably accidentally and probably due to mental instability, fired a weapon.
That is absolutely, unequivocally wrong.
Do you have any idea what it takes to have someone involuntarily committed or declared incompetent? Obviously not. It is, and should be, a very difficult hurdle. In the mean time, the person is free to legally possess a firearm. Where, pray tell, do you draw the line? It’s not so easy.
Oh, and by the way, that database the article mentions - the only way to determine if one is barred from purchasing a firearm? Not all states participate, and those that do have different rules about who should be included and for how long. We can’t even get that part right.
But make this apolitical sound bite if you want, it’s certainly easier that way.