Hmmm…that’s not such a bad idea. Within a month, the troublemakers in the school will have been shot by the other students and the schools will be a much more peaceful place. Worth investigating.
This is interesting; I hadn’t heard of this before. I can’t find out much about it, though. A Salon article mentions that “there was an armed security guard”, but that’s about it. This timeline says that there was “a school security officer hiding in the school’s main office,” but does not say that he was armed.
So, who was this “armed security guard”, and what did he do when the attacks started? I can’t find any good info.
Giving teachers guns seems like a cure that’s worse than the disease. What’s the prevalence of school shootings in the U.S.? There’s certainly been a good amount in the news, but what proportion of schools in the U.S. have been attacked in this way? I’d imagine a very low one.
So by allowing teachers to have guns at every school - even well-trained teachers and hidden/safe storage - you’d hugely up the risk of either someone stealing the gun, or a teacher not bothering with the safety checks and leaving it out or carrying it, or a teacher using it to threaten a class, or a teacher genuinely going nuts and shooting up the place themselves…
Obviously the shooting of kids is a pretty horrible crime, and I too wouldn’t balk at a perpetrator being lethally stopped during a spree, but honestly giving teachers guns just seems like it’d bring new, much more common problems. It would be like saving someone from a snake by setting a tiger on it; the snake problem is solved, but that’s no longer the biggest priority.
I am in no way anti-gun, but I am dead set against this idea.
Let’s suppose you are the teacher in your school that is trained to handle the school firearm. You hear shots. Are you obligated to retrieve the weapon form your biometric safe and hunt down the shooter or shooters? What happens if you don’t
Look at the recent shooting of the principal here in Wisconsin. The school janitor wrestled the shotgun away from the shooter as he entered the building. He realized that the student had another gun and was pulling it on the principal. He had a shotgun in his hands, but his instinct was not to shoot the student, but instead to shout a warning. I don’t know if teachers could identify a student as a target that needs to be shot.
Oh and GorillaMan,
You are cordially invited dine on my excrement. Make fun of the moron who came up with this stupid idea, but leave the state I live in out of it.
Might as well outsource private security. Of course, in most schools, the priority should be to remove as many children as possible from the area rather than starting a shooting match with an armed intruder.
The thing is, that schools are not entirely gun free. I can never say for absolute sure whether or not one of the kids is packing. Although I don’t like to think of it, my guess is that a lot of days some kid is.
As to why a gun becomes useless in the hands of someone defending themselves; my feeling is a matter of focus.
When the gunman enters the situation he is intent on using the gun. I, on the other hand, am busy trying to finagle essays out of a 10th grade class of 30 with 5th grade skills. I am aware of my suroundings. I know that Jessica just pulled out her cell phone. I know that Tyrone is about to throw a paper ball. I know that Dwayne is busily writing away but that I need to make sure he really understood what it was he was supposed to write about. I know that Judy and George just broke up and that Quintessa has been hitting hard on George so if that note that just got passed is from one of them, it could get bad in the halls during passing. I can change my focus, but its going to take a few seconds. If we were dealing with other weapons, that is enough reaction time. It just isn’t with guns.
I wish that we could man the metal detectors every day. That would be a good solution. Most of the schools I deal with, people have to be buzzed in after the school day starts. I think we can do better there.
If they can’t afford to hire a cop, schools sure can’t afford to train teachers, pay for licensing, purchase guns/ammo and pay for insurance that’s going to be astronomical.
This doesn’t even make sense. I’d love to see how this idea would fly with the teachers union. Maybe it’s the area I live in, but if a job requirement for teachers is going require teachers to carry a gun and possibly use it your going to have a real teacher shortage. Sure people say they’d defend their students with their life but is it going to be written into their contracts that they have to defend the students in their class with their life like a secret service agent? You better be willing to pay these teachers big bucks.
I’m not trying to insult teachers but when I was in school teachers weren’t exactly Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt, willing to hop over desks and have shoot outs with bad guys or crazed students. One of my teachers would forget the combination on his briefcase at least once a week.
If we’re at the point where people are seriously considering something this drastic based on a remote possibility of something like this happening, maybe all kids should stay home and be homeschooled or work online.
Seriously, what about kids during sports practice? Should gym teachers and coaches have guns? How about a kid running cross country track? Are we going to have snipers in the trees in case a nut jumps out of the bushes.
I know people enjoy guns and they have a right to have them but they really aren’t going to solve every problem in the world, especially this one.
If guns make us safer,lets arm the students.
It looks like there was a great effort made to keep the man’s name out of the newspapers. There is some discrepancy over whether it was a security guard or a sheriff’s deputy; I’m thinking maybe it was a sheriff’s deputy moonlighting as a security guard. There are lots of links in the New York Times archives that I don’t want to pay for, but I did find the following links, whose journalistic integrity I can’t vouch for (bolding mine):
This guy appears to be someone stridently in favor of protecting the second amendment. His name is David Kopel. This is from his site:
Here’s a Slate article you may already have seen, and here’s an excerpt:
I figure if former military folks like myself wanted to go into law enforcement, they would have done so. If a school wants armed people protecting the campus, they really ought to hire professional security guards rather than trying to pawn the duty off on teachers.
On the other hand, I’ve never watched a whole episode of 24, but I would probably watch a whole season of Jack Bauer as a high school teacher who is suddenly confronted with a Columbine-style massacre.
I was going to come in here and say that the first time an armed teacher accidentally killed a student, some other idiot legislator would propose arming the students, and then that’d be Game Over.
I should have known that by the time I finished reading the thread, somebody would propose it seriously.
Did some more research, and it turns out there’s a 7,000+ page report on Columbine online for those who want the whole story.
I believe the guard who has been referenced in these various news story was the School Resource Officer, Neal Gardner, a sheriff’s deputy. Here’s a link to a CNN special that deals with his part in the events.
That was declared un-Constitutional more than a decade ago.
From: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wbardwel/public/nfalist/us_v_murphy.txt
Complete decision at: United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995).
Although generally good, Wikipedia can at times be one of the most inaccurate or incomplete references on the entire web, and that you should never “cite” it without other backing information.
Er . . . we were sort of joking about arming the students. Or am I being whooshed?
Unintended but totally predictable consequence.
Bad guy to other bad guy: “Okay, we think the teachers in this school might be packing, so when I go to kick the door in, have your gun out and cap the teacher immediately.”
QED.
This policy will result in more dead teachers.
I think poor old Marley didn’t even feel the sonic boom as the joke flew past his head. 
Actually, I thought everybody was kidding except you.
I contend the reason there are so FEW school shootings is that guns are not allowed in schools.
Well, thanks for the informed correction Una, I sincerely appreciate that. I was in high school back then and remember it being passed (and the sign out front of the building); guess I’ve been out of touch since as I recall hearing nothing about a retraction… Cool.
It appears there are similar state statutes that ban guns in schools for many states, so for the current discussion the point is valid. Here’s the one for Wisconsin, and it’s oddly enough defined as “on school grounds” or “1000 feet from school grounds”
Cite for Wisconsin (see sec 948.605 - from atf.gov)
I browsed around and couldn’t find a state that permitted guns in schools. OK, seems that Oregon allows CCW on school premises:
FWIW, there are still signs up at a school nearby that say “Gun Free School Zone”, even though they have no meaning, as no local laws designated such. I guess there’s no law against a school making a claim to a law that no longer exists.
Thrasymachus said “The important thing isn’t that the teacher has a gun and can shoot a baddie, it’s that a teacher might have a gun and thus the baddie may think twice about the spree.”
Which is why I replied that school shooters don’t seem to care about their safety.