Finn Again: the reference to the level of danger within American schools is implicit in the fact that you are arguing that it is necessary for people with guns to be stationed there. Which seems a wholly extreme circumstance (usual disclaimer: British so don’t know anyone who feels the need to be armed at any point in their lives and have never considered what if there were more guns to be the solution to any problem).
You’re confusing me on a practical level. When and how is this training to be carried out? Are the teachers doing it voluntarily in their own time? If American teachers are anything like British ones, they already have work to do that spills into their own time - lesson planning, etc.
Teachers are professional teachers, they are not professional marksmen, guards, whatever. I was not in anyway impugning the professionalism of teachers with regards to their jobs. Didn’t want that to be in anyway unclear.
Non-lethal - no use in most extreme circumstances, likely can’t be used in other circumstances. If teachers are to be given tasers, why not just allow the whole civilian populace to carry them? I’m sure that a school is no more of a risk zone than any other work area or public place.
Lethal - likely to detract from the teachers ability to teach, either by having them training when they should be preparing a class, making them less approachable to students or just plain distracting them from the task at hand. Likelihood of mistakes or accidents is always there - where you have the possibility of shooting, you have the possibility of shooting someone who turns out not to have been a threat. Where the people expected to shoot are not making those decisions on a regular basis, the likelihood is increased.
Well, let me put it this way. I’m sure that in most cases there will be absolutely no need for most schools to have guns. Then again, I’m also sure that there will be absolutely no need for most schools to have sexual harrasment guidelines. Sometimes you prepare for a worst case scenario, and hopefully you’ll never need to actualy deal with such a situation.
Of course teachers are very busy, which is why training would be through their own free will and yes, on their own free time. As for how it’d be accomplished, I assume training with the local police should be good enough, especially since I’d assume that ay teachers allowed access to guns would need to be certified up the wazoo.
My point is though that already, as part of our profession, we’re responsible for the health and safety of our students. Why not give dedicated professionals access to proper training and the ability to protect their students in the event that the worst happens?
IIRC, in most places civilians can carry tasers.
I just don’t understand why we’re saying it’s okay for there to be security guards, but not teachers able to react… I mean, we trust our teachers at least as much as the security guards, right?
I don’t see any of these being a problem.
If I don’t have lesson plans, I don’t have a job. So preperation isn’t an issue.
Having a firearm in a box in my desk wouldn’t make me any less likely to be helpful or care about my students. Likewise, having such a weapon in my desk most likely wouldn’t enter into my mind or distract from my lesson that day.
How is this any different than having armed police? We trust them and train them, why not teachers?
Police also don’t make these decisions on a regular basis, but we trust their judgement and training.
Why should the school have to spend $$$ to do the parents job?
Why have to have ‘zero’ tolerance BS?
Why not have reasonable responses?
Because: "We as a people don’t want it, won’t be responsible for it and will blame others for our own shortcomings regardless of who and how many it hurts.
The problem is crappy people and our willingness to protect them at all cost because they are “us”.
It is not about the guns, it is about unreasoned fear… And moral bankruptcy.
It is about unwillingness and lack of responsibility and the fear every time we look in the mirror and see that we are the ones responsible and that scares the shit out of people.
We are so afraid of death that we cause more and more by shifting all responsibility for it to someone else.
A lot of these kids can not be saved because they were condemned by their parents and society when they were very young. No one would stand up and say that it was wrong. That would be getting involved.
I think part of what he is saying is that there are some things we cannot be prepared for.
School shootings, compared to other forms of crime or even other forms of violent crime, are still very rare. The problem is that every time there is a school shooting, the media goes into full fledged “summer of the shark” mode. Next thing you know we’re paying taxes to the bear patrol.
And what was the title of that pit thread? It’s certainly admirable that you are a teacher, and you have my sympathies, but your views alone are not something to build a position on.
Besides, there are other issues here. 200-300 hours of training sounds fine. That leaves just a few more points to consider. If you do it on a volunteer basis, what happens when people don’t volunteer? Worse yet, what happens when the wrong kind of teacher volunteers? We know teachers that shouldn’t really be allowed near students much less being allowed near students while armed.
That’s also 200-300 more hours of pay over the summer when teachers are normally laid off. Not to mention hazard pay for those that will be in this response team. And if the schools are high risk enough to need their own response team, why shouldn’t the other teachers get paid more as well?
How much good is a gun in a lock box going to do when the kid that comes in to do the shooting has the gun already drawn and is ready to fire? If the teacher gets to “pack heat” as the kids were saying way too long ago, what happens when they get overpowered by a student and have the gun taken away. If the kid doesn’t come in to the armed teachers classroom, he’ll still have time to take a few students out before the teacher can get there to stop him or contain him. Will an armed teacher be any better as far as preventing more deaths than the police?
Lastly, if an armed security guard/police officer is not a deterrent, how much better will an armed math teacher be?
Just curious, but why exactly don’t I have a valid position?
No, school shootings aren’t common, they’re a worst case scenario. But we make contingency plans for worst case scenarios all the time. I mean, why have security guards at all otherwise?
Then you don’t have any armed teachers.
What happens if no teachers sign up to learn first aid and CPR?
A thorough vetting process should take care of that, standard psych workup, etc… Besides, if you can’t qualify for concealed carry, you probably shouldn’t be teaching anyways.
Well, most teachers (IIRC) are on sallary, not hourly. Also, if local PD’s offered this training, and teachers did it of their own free will, there’d really be no need to pay them.
Why should teachers who haven’t had as much training get paid as much as those who have?
If he just walks into the classroom and then opens fire? Probably none.
I’ve seen this argument a few times in this thread, and it’s just silly.
Are we honestly going to assume that a crazed student comes into the school, starts murdering people, and then will choose to wrestle a teacher for their gun instead of shooting? I couldn’t see a teacher drawing a weapon in any other situation, so having it taken away really isn’t a problem. We’re not talking about a teacher with a gun holstered to his/her hip, after all.
Yep. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than there being nobody, at all, who can stop a crazed student.
Response time for police: about three minutes (at best).
Response time for teacher: about sixty seconds (at worst).
I’m sure an armed security guard is a deterrent, but there is also generally only one of 'em, and they’re real easy to spot. If students had no idea which teachers were armed, they’d have to think twice. With a clearly marked security guard, they know exactly where to place the first few rounds of their killing spree.
Finn, I wasn’t saying that your position was invalid. I was simply saying that your views as a teacher do not invalidate someone elses position simply because you are a teacher.
I was also not saying that an already armed student will wrestle a teacher with a gun and then steal that gun. My concern was that an unarmed student in the class would take the gun from the teacher and then proceed to start a school shooting type scenario.
Thank you for the correction on the salary. I wasn’t sure and figured you’d point it out if I was mistaken. As far as untrained teachers getting paid as much as trained, it would be because they are at as much of a risk if not more of getting shot as the trained. They just wouldn’t have the means to defend themselves.
Now that I think about it, those teachers who were turned down for the gun program could and would sue simply out of the reasoning that “if their is a risk and they get to defend themselves why can’t I?” In the end, the schools would likely wind up with the standard “no felony conviction” background check as a normal gun store.
Personally, I would much rather see teachers trained in how to protect their students and keep them calm in the event of a school shooting then see them armed just in case. Lock the door, stay out of sight, keep the kids calm, call the police is much easier and probably just as effective as Get the kids calm, get your gun, figure out where the shots are coming from, call the police, attempt to contain or take out shooter.
Ahhh… nothing better than instilling paranoia at the earliest possible time on the minds of young people; it would surely work wonders on their mental stability, or would make shootings more frequent?
The more I am in the classroom, and the longer I teach, the more it astounds me how much students live up to or down to expectations. If you treat them as though they are in a prison camp, somehow they act like prisoners. If you treat them as though they are smart, somehow they are. The more we seem to arm our schools, the more they seem to need it.
There are some other points. I am not very physicaly strong, but even if I trained and worked out, alot of these kids are just plain bigger and stronger. They also are nuts. I can’t see keeping my gun out of their hands. consider the case of the security guard in Georgia a couple weeks ago shot by a guy she was taking to trial. People say she maybe shouldn’t have been alone with a bigger inmate. I am in a classroom with up to 45 kids at a time, are we supposed to start hiring 2 teachers for every student? If we could get a teacher for every 20 kids instead of every 45 it is my guess we wouldn’t need the discussion.
The idea that kids won’t know where the guns are is laughable. Just because they can’t tell you anything of any lesson they have ever had does not mean that they do not know where the guns are. Try it at home. Ask your kid where the tape is. Kids know where everything is. They know the last time I wore that sweater, and what my favorite shoes are, and when I get a quarter inch cut off my hair. I will see if I can find the study, but I remember hearing of a study on households with guns. In many cases the parents didn’t believe their children knew there were guns in the house. Not only did they know, but they knew where they were hidden, where the keys to the cabinet were, and where the ammo was. Now if they would only remember where they put their damn homework.
Liabilty becomes a huge problem. Because of the fear of lawsuits, any kid you fail has to be documented up the wazoo. How many times did you contact his parents? What assistance did you offer. A friend of mine talked to one kids mother every week from about two weeks into the semester because the kid was doing no work what-so-ever. At the end of the semester, the father, who worked in the district administration downtown, tried to get the principle to overturn the failure because the teacher didn’t contact him too. There was a deal localy where parents sued the school because their kid got homework. Schools can’t afford these suits even if they win, and if we can’t fail a kid without a lawsuit, imagine what would happen if we shot one. Not to mention what would happen if a kid got our gun and shot someone.
We got in this mess because of a cultural belief that guns can solve conflicts. The kids toting guns to school seem to think so. I think we need to model other ways of dealing with problems.
I am not for arming teachers, but using the arguement of leave it to the professionals is weak in my mind. My experience with professional security personnel (public or private) is that they have a lot less grasp of the situation than most teachers. I worry about a person who joins a profession that has them wear a uniform, carry firearms and the like and has less than an eighth of the training a typical teacher has.
Agreed, didn’t mean to imply that. But I would like to know if I’d ever be allowed any more options than “Hope the room I’m in has a lock, and hope that the kid doesn’t figure out that he can blast it off the door.”
But this risk is eliminated with boxes which have electronic locks which can only be opened from the main office.
Well, I guess if a school was getting shot up then they might have a point, but since this would be prevention for a worst case scenario I don’t really see a problem.
I hope that such lawsuits would quickly be beaten. It’s obvious that teachers would need to be held to much higher standards that your average gun owner.
Paranoia?
“If someone tries to kill me, my teacher can protect me.”
Wow… can you feel the seething paranoia?
furlibusea: You don’t have to treat your students like they’re in a prison. You don’t have to figure that any of your kids would snap and ‘go postal’. I mean, even though it sounds like your classes are ridiculously overcrowded, I’d assume that you know your kids.
The supposed omniscience of children aside, how, exactly, would they know? Let’s say that every teacher in the school had a desk drawer which was locked. There would be absolutely no way that the students could know who had a gun in it, and who didn’t. Kids may be wide eyed and full of curiousity about certain things, but they don’t have X-ray vision.
I’d wager that kids have much more access to their own home than a teacher’s locked desk.
Yes… many parents make the job of teaching very, very difficult. Especially considering that we really do need their help to teach most effectively. But, I can’t see a teacher shooting a student who wasn’t already on a rampage. I think a lawsuit like that would be thrown out of court without even being heard.
“My child killed several classmates and teachers, and then was shot. We are outraged that someone stopped him from murdering more people!”
I also really can’t see a situation in which a student could get a gun away from a teacher. An already armed student wouldn’t waste time closing to close quarters and attempting to disarm the teacher, he/she would just open fire.
I disagree.
I started a thread on this, and we couldn’t really reach any agreement… but no, I don’t think it has to do with the fact that guns provide lethal levels of self defense (not solve conflicts, that’s irresponsible gun ownership). These kids goal is to murder as many people as possible, and in Columbine they tried to rig up explosives. Was that tragedy caused because of a cultural belief that explosives can solve conflicts?
The fact of the matter is, once you get to that stage, it’s not about conflict resolution, but murder.
[Smart-assed NRA member response]
What? More gun restriction laws? Is this the anti-gun right groups’ solution to every problem? More restrictions on the use and ownership of firearms?
Mebbe you ain’t noticed it you reactive asshole, but (according you gun-grabbing, panic artists) the vast increase in firearms restrictions that have been enacted in the past 30 years, and are proposed in the wake of every one of the shootings of this type, ain’t working so goddamned well either. Mebbe until a more palatable solution can be indentified, this ain’t so bad an idea. That is, if implemented with proper precautions.
Wadn’t that long ago (I’m *only 43 fer God’s sake), my high school of over 3500 students (I lived then in the 52 largest city in the U.S., not some rural backwater) had a fucking shooting team. Guns were not only not illegal on campus, but on certain days, they were actually required - if you were part of the shooting team, that is.
Because of course, none of these super teacher sharpshooters would EVER miss their target, right? Nor could they make a mistake and harm or kill a student unintentionally. It’s not like cops or soldiers ever do this, so why should we believe this might happen to our marksmen teachers?
Sarcasm aside, what happens when some kid breaks into the lockbox and uses a teacher’s gun to kill the bulyl who’s been taking his lunch money?
How about when some teachers gets into a physical altercation with a student and shooots him/her? I would hope none of these trained professional teachers would loose their cool or critical thinking abilitites when angered, specially since that has NEVER happenend to a teacher.
If we’re talking about a situation where a rampage has already started? No, I don’t think we’d see ‘mistakes’. Other students getting caught in the crossfire, maybe… but what would you prefer, one innocent student hit in the exchange of gunfire, or half a dozen gunned down by the shooter?
So we’d be talking about breaking into a locked desk drawer (which might or might not actually have a gun) and then breaking into a locked metal box? Those boxes are pretty secure, I think you’re clutching at straws.
If you think any of your teachers might be capable of murder, best to get 'em out of the school system ASAP. Moreoever, this is exactly what psychological testing would ferret out.
Yeah… because losing your cool is the same as whipping out a gun and murdering a student.
There are not enough rolleyes in the world.
Yeah, why do Liberals hate America so much? Really, this sort of statement not only lowers discourse, it also makes the person saying it look like a douche bag.
It’s certainly admirable that you are a teacher, and you have my sympathies, but your views alone are not something to build a position on.