That sounds really easy! I bet it works best if you cock your head to one side before you make the kill shot. It would also be good to have something to say after, like “You’ve been held back. Permanently.”. Or “No hall pass for you!”. Or, “That’s what I call an in-school suspension!”
For the record, a system similar to that suggested by the OP is practiced in Israeli schools. It seems to work fine, although admittedly the teachers involved generally have far more military training than their potential American equivalents.
I remember a few of the (male, but what can you do) teachers in my high school discretely carrying handguns. Nobody though much of it.
It’s part of the core job requirements of law enforcement officers to be proficient with firearms. They undergo regular and consitent training, and held accountable for their performance at the range and in their ongoing training classes. They are also trained to handle crisis situations and tense confrontations.
On the other hand, gun proficiency is not a requirement for an elementary school teacher. They may or may not regularly practice, and they almost certainly do not get the same level of training and practice that an officer of the law gets. They receive some training in responding to emergencies, but nowhere near the level that a police officer receives.
I don’t know how anyone could think that your average teacher - even one who is familiar with gun use - would be a sufficient subsitute for a dedicated security or law enforcement person.
This was one of the things I posted in the How can we better prevent school shootings? (I’m sure others had as well, though I hadn’t read all the responses when I posted last night).
It’s one of those cost to benefits things…or, probability of an event happening combined with what it would cost to prevent it. School shootings, for all that they are spectacular and capture the public’s sympathy and anger, are rare events. 10’s of millions of kids go to school every day. The act of going to school itself is a higher risk for the majority of these kids than that some whack-a-do or angst ridden teen age loser is going to take it into their head to shoot up the school.
The cost to remove all risk from every facet of the public’s lives is simply prohibitive. Sure, we COULD put in an armed presence at the schools (trained armed security…I’m unsure why folks keep bringing up armed teachers…IP cameras and a security center to monitor those cameras for suspicious activity, etc etc), but the costs would be huge for the gain of a handful of lives. In the mean time, since schools would be hard targets, people with a pathological and homicidal bent would just move to other perceived soft targets…which, because of the public outcry someone would want to protect as well.
You simply can’t protect everyone. Life has inherent risks, especially in a large, technological, sophisticated and free society as we have…and they are fairly low probability risks that we have to take. Oh, we can mitigate them to a certain extent. Drunk driving laws, seat belts, warnings on tobacco products…and, of course, laws on ownership and illegal use of firearms. At a certain point, however, you simply can’t mitigate anymore…not without prohibitive cost and political backlash. People simply have to be allowed to live their lives, and take their chances.
I guess this is where folks are thinking you meant arming teachers. When you say ‘school personnel’ are we talking about school security, or are we talking about arming (and training?) the teachers and administrative staff?
If you were really going to do this, I’d suggest hiring real security personnel, at least for the armed part of the proposal. You could have other security types (or even teachers or admin staff) monitoring the cameras (I’d probably go with regional central monitors with only a few armed personnel at each school, but even there the costs would be pretty large), but I don’t think that training and arming regular school personnel would be realistic…or politically comfortable to most parents. Hell, you are going to get backlash from some parents even if you have well trained security personnel who are armed, since parents ability to assess risk…well, as bad as everyone else I suppose.
There are some things that everyone should be allowed to do, even without training: sing, dance, garden, write, etc… There are other things that only trained professionals should be allowed to do: perform brain surgery, pilot a commercial airliner, serve as defendant in a capital murder case. I strongly support the laws that restrict activities in the later group to trained professionals. I do not know exactly what training is required in those cases. I leave it to the people in the relevant professions and regulatory bodies to decide exactly what training is appropriate. I’d take the same approach to police training.
This may be true; I wouldn’t know. But I’d bet that police go through a lot of training that’s relevant to such situations, even if it doesn’t literally involve shooting. I’d bet that police receive training intended to improve their response times, help them concentrate and think clearly when violence breaks out, and do other things which improve the odds of successfully handling an emergency.
(And thank you for pointing out the fact about the Fort Hood shootings. I didn’t remember the details. Nonetheless my main point still stands; the USA has lots of privately owned guns, lots of heavily armed security guards, and lots of gun massacres in public places. Other first world countries have far fewer guns and far fewer gun massacres.)
I believe you are over estimating the amount of training that police receive. Annual or semi-annual qualification is not training. It is, at best, a verification of minimum skills. When I was a deputy sheriff, I was required to qualify annually. Many of the local police departments sent their officers to qualify with us, rather than have “range days” of their own. We fired, IIRC, 75 shots at ranges from 5 yards out to 50 yards at targets like this. It involved a couple reloads and clearing a simulated jam. Although there was scoring, there was no difference between passing with a perfect score and passing with a minimum score. Either way, you were qualified to carry a gun for another year. Officers and deputies were routinely run through the course over and over until they managed a passing score.
SWAT, in those agencies that have it, may actually train and practice as part of their duties. The majority of police, IME, receive no additional training after they leave the academy and the rounds they fire at qualification are all the “practice” they get with their service weapon. As has been noted in other threads, if you belong to a gun club that rents its ranges out to LE, most club members stay away from the club on those days because you tend to have some poor gun handling going on.
Do even police officers get that level of training? And in any event when a first responder is at least ten minutes away, anything would be better than nothing.
Let me clarify something. If the OP is talking about bringing in armed security, it makes me sad, but it’s probably a reasonable step in an increased defensive posture.
If we are talking about armed teachers, I’m not in agreement.
This is very true. I’d rather more money go to actual education, rather than training teachers in gun use. I don’t mind having one or two armed cops per school, I remember my high school having a cop always there. But arming teachers just seems like a waste of money that wouldn’t make me feel that things are safer.
It’s not that cops are supermen. It’s that both cops and civilians are human. Cops have more training for using guns, but they still sometimes accidentally shoot innocents or miss hitting the criminals.
Anything is not always better than nothing-sometimes the wrong “anything” is worse than nothing.
Any time a gun isn’t on your body or under your direct control, its empty with the ammo locked in a different space. And if so much as one shell comes up missing, its a lock-down and search and screw students rights. Or least it used to be that way ages ago in more rural PA. I can remember a time way back when when we felt like we were under martial law until that box of .22 rimfires was accounted for. And our parents backed the school 100% ------ or if they didn’t, we never heard about it.
Late 60s, mid 70s people still hunted on their way to and from our school - students and teachers alike. While at the building, your firearm and ammo got locked up by the gym teacher the same way the school shooting teams gear was locked. Some teachers would trigger lock and desk/closet lock their guns but ammo had to be with Mr Mixie. One teacher had a handgun on him (on his person) as a general rule; I would assume it was loaded but I don’t know if anyone ever knew either way. Of course, firearms safety was part of the general course of study from 7th grade on and one of the few “gym credits” you really needed to pass.
When I started teaching (inner city) my general habit was to lock the clip in my glove compartment and lock my pistol in my briefcase before entering the building but ------- I knew where I could snag a clip fast in an emergency. IE - I had a hide-out if I didn’t have 30 seconds to go out the window and back. Kids going on a rampage never occurred to me back then - our fear was more someone on PCP or some disturbed individual attacking our kids. And it happened enough to be a real fear.
I’m in the center on this fight; I see both sides. Since the 68GCA I see more and stricter laws passed and unthinkable events (things we never even dreamed of) become common. So convincing me more laws are going to help is going to be a tough sale. But I also don’t think you are ever going to be able to mandate basic firearms training again or instill a respect for firearms in todays kids. We grew up with it for the most part. And yes, we played “army” but that was hardly like the FPS games kids play today. The world is different.
Armed guards? Some percentage of teachers cross-trained by the State Police to CCW on the job? Who knows? Its at least worthy of discussion.
The day they want me to carry on campus is the day I quit teaching.
We have armed security on our campus, and have for years. In fact, that person is a member of the Sheriffs Department. Uniformed and armed. Usually they are walking a drug dog around or dealing with kids selling meth or weed, but they are expected to “forwardly-engage” any threat on campus.
Armed guards in an elementary school? How many? The shooters often don’t care about their lives. They plan their act ahead of time, carry it out, and then commit suicide. If we put a policeman in a school and he’s in the library making his rounds when a shooter comes in up front, what good does he do?
I teach at an elementary school. We have a camera and a buzzer on locked front doors. We also have kids and teachers going in and out of those doors all the time. We have doors that lead to to the front playground, side playground, cafeteria, bus dismissal area, principal’s office, and library. Those doors are locked from the outside, but if someone comes in or goes out, it’s ridiculously easy for someone to gain access before the door closes. Ever needed to get into a gated community, not had a pass, and waited until someone else went in, then hustled behind them before the gate came back down?
Unless we make our schools into virtual prisons, I don’t see how we can stop a determined person from gaining access. Not only do I not want that, the thought that money is going to be allocated for such a system is laughable. Getting books is a problem. Computers that were made in the past 7 years in the classroom? Nope.
I could come up with a couple of dozen scenarios where someone who wanted to kill children at a school could do so without ever entering the building. Anyone familiar with a particular school’s routine could do the same. The only way to eliminate shootings at schools is to completely eliminate guns – all guns. That’s not going to happen.
There are some problems for which there is no perfect answer. The best we can do is make it as hard as possible for those who decide to commit these acts. What are we willing to sacrifice to do so?
As someone who works part time in a major city’s school system, I completely agree.
Let me say this about arming teachers: get ready for more Trayvon Martin/ Zimmerman situations. Teachers have ALOT of things going on. Inner city schools are full of deliquents, and problematic children and young adults. It wouldn’t take much for an amped up teacher to use his/her force. Or for a student to get the gun away from a teacher.
Turning schools into Liberia or the OK Corral is no answer.
From my experience dealing with the common sense of administrators and fellow teachers, the idea of them carrying guns scares the crap out of me.
Instead of mandating that teachers carry concealed weapons—a terrible idea for many of the reasons already stated in the thread—why not allow those teachers who’ve already gone through the work to get CHLs, the right to carry their weapons on campus? I don’t think it will change much, one way or the other, and the posters advocating armed security and restricting access are on a better path, but does it harm much to remove the restriction?
Many teachers that would be eligible to carry under this revised program, won’t, for a variety of reasons: inability to secure the weapon to their satisfaction, not wanting to wear the uncomfortable hunk of metal all day, etc… But why not allow those who wish to carry concealed, and have proven to the state that they are responsible enough to do so, a la Alessan’s mention of affairs in Israel? For those who find the idea of an armed teacher anathema, in CCW states, you and your children are already in the midst of armed citizens discretely carrying out and about, at the grocery store, movie theater, shopping mall. They are not killing each other, or letting their handguns be stolen or misplaced. (Oddly, it seems to usually be LEOs where you see the misplacing happen.) What makes school so different for you?
Schools used to be armed, as several posters have already noted. My own high school used to have students who would go duck hunting before class and leave the shotguns in the car. Nobody thought anything of it, other than to shake their head at the crazy rednecks/aggies. Others have mentioned schools having rifle teams. Liberia or the O.K. Corral did not happen. Come down like the metaphorical Hand of God on anyone who misuses their concealed weapon, or loses it of course, but disallowing weapons at a school merely means that a spree shooter doesn’t have to worry about being shot while he’s killing his victims. Until the police show up, which can be multiple minutes in the future, the killer can proceed largely unimpeded. This is another reason for having the armed security onsite, even if she’s in another classroom or the library; the response time’s shorter than a police officer who has to drive to the school. It’s not a panacea: the Columbine killers were confronted by a campus police officer before entering the building where they killed the majority of their victims, but then again, it might help.
Would the school decide which teachers would have guns? Could they require a teacher to have a weapon? On what basis(short temper, lack of proper training, has had psychiatric help in the past to help deal with the students, etc.) could a school rescind the right of a teacher to carry a weapon on school grounds?
All of those things would be subject to negotiation as part of the contract between the district and the teachers in states where there is collective bargaining. In those where there is not, then the district would be able to set those things as part of their conditions of employment much as they do with more commonplace things now. All this presuming there were changes in state and federal law to make such things a realistic possibility in the first place.
Indeed. This is one of the downsides: how many good teachers would quit due to yet another onerous requirement, this one anathema to many folks? I’m on the fence about whether we need much stricter restrictions on handgun ownership, but I’m not at all on the fence about whether I need to be carrying. I don’t, and I won’t.
The cure for the ills of free speech is more free speech, but the cure for the ills of guns in school is not more guns in school.
Only the school board and the teachers union would be involved in these talks?