[Rant] So You Want to Arm the Teachers

[thefourthvine]

My son is in preschool right now. Since Newtown, I've been staring at his school, at his building, at his classmates, and thinking of all those kids who are dead now. I don't think any parent can help that.

And, hey, I am willing to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again. Suggestions I've heard from gun control proponents: Reduce gun access, reduce rate of fire, increase waiting periods, make smart guns (with biometric chips to prevent firing by someone other than owner) mandatory.

Suggestion I've heard again and again from gun fanatics: Arm teachers. When every teacher has a gun, every child will be safe.



Gun fanatics, guys, can we talk about this? I like that you're trying, I like that you've acknowledged we have a terrible problem and we need to solve it now. But I don't think your solution is going to work. I keep running through it in my mind and hitting walls.

First, if we arm the teachers - well, it's not enough to arm them, right? (Although I tell you what: as a parent and taxpayer, I really am not thrilled with the idea that my school taxes will be going on guns instead of books. And please tell me you don't expect the teachers to buy their own guns.) You also have to train them. And this isn't a situation where you'll be training someone who wants to learn - most of these people will be afraid of guns, unwilling to fire them, unwilling to learn, because guess what: people who want to fire guns go into the military or law enforcement or gun shop ownership or whatever. They don't become teachers. I mean, sure, there are some teachers who like guns and are good with them, but it's not going to be the majority by any means. Most of them are going to be like me. I am sure you could teach me to safely own, handle, and fire a gun. I'm also sure that it would take a lot of work on your part, because I have limited dexterity, I don't have good aim, I (like many people) tend to freeze and shut down when I'm scared, and most of all: I don't want to learn to shoot a gun. I mean, most teachers will be like me unless you prioritize the ability to use firearms over the ability to, say, teach reading.

And these people can't just be trained a little. They have to be good enough to make a targeted shot when they're terrified (and remember: a lot of them, like me, will be prone to shutting down or freezing in an emergency; that is a human thing that happens), in a classroom where any miss means they may become the child-murderer. They have to be good enough to know when to fire. They have to be good enough to know when not to fire. Even police officers aren't always that good (links to many, many cases available as necessary), and police officers go into their careers expecting to learn to fire guns.

In other words, you're talking about adding a whole lot of training. For every teacher in every classroom in the country. Even though some states are so desperate for (cheap) teachers they've cut requirements and allow teachers to get certified for teaching over time as they're teaching. But the gun training - to be safe with a gun, to be useful with a gun, you have to know all this stuff before you step into the classroom. So you're proposing we prioritize educating teachers about guns over educating teachers about teaching.

Now. Let's say you get your wish. We no longer have teachers. We have a vaguely-educated militia heading up our nation's classrooms. Wow, I really hope no teacher ever loses it. And I say this as someone who once watched her teacher have a nervous breakdown. We sat frozen in our seats, twenty-two fourteen-year-old targets, as he yelled, wept, and threw things at us - pencils, chalk, a mug, books. Despite the noise and the open door, it took twenty minutes for someone to come help us. If he'd had access to a gun, boy, that would have gone a lot better, right?

No. I'd be dead.

And, hey, let's hope no teacher who has been trained to respond to threats by shooting them, trained to shoot instantly and well, ever feels threatened by a student at all. Or wants power over a student at all.

Or are you saying you're okay with that kind of collateral damage? With kids at risk from their teachers if the teachers are having a bad day or a bad time? Because to me this sounds like a recipe for more dead kids, not fewer. And what I want is no dead kids.

I don't know how to solve that one, but let's assume you do. (Spoiler: You won't.) Now we have our teachers, and they're trained, and they're armed, and they're ready and willing to shoot. Where do you keep the guns? If they're safely stored in the classroom - in a locked box, ammunition separate from the gun - then I'm not really clear on how the teacher is going to get to the gun in case of a mass shooting.

And if they're not safely stored, if they're on the teacher - look, have you been to a classroom recently? Not a high school. A preschool. A kindergarten. A first grade classroom. Those teachers have a lot of physical contact with the students. It's inevitable. My son is carried around by his teachers, he sits on their laps, he hugs them. And he's curious. He gets into everything. I can tell you: if you spend a lot of time in physical contact with a small child, that child will investigate your bra, your glasses, your hair, your buttons, the contents of your pockets. The inside of your nose and ears if you have even a moment's distraction. There's no strap or buckle that will keep kids out of anything; you need a lock. With a key in another location. That the kids don't know about. (Yes, of course a four year old can use a lock to open a door and can find a key if he knows where it's kept.) But we just discussed how locks won't work.

So how do we keep these curious, investigating kids away from the guns? Are we back at biometric sensors? Hey, then can we just try the biometric sensors first, see how that works, and then maybe spend a fortune and incur a huge risk to raise our very first teaching army? Seems like the biometric sensors would be easier, cost less, and be faster. Or are you saying that you want the teachers six feet from their students at all times? Because you'll need a fence if you want that. An unclimbable one, let me just mention, as the parent of a climber. (And you'll also need an adult on the other side of the fence, one who isn't armed, because the younger kids don't respond well to teachers under glass. And that adult can't be armed. Wait, we're back to unarmed teachers. WHAT NOW?)

Now let's summarize, proponent of armed teachers. Your vision of our safe, glorious future:

1. Teachers untrained in teaching.
   
2. Who are crack shots with extensive weapons training.
   
3. Who are armed.
   
4. Who teach from behind Plexiglas walls.
   
5. In disintegrating schools (because I can't imagine you're going to approve massive tax increases to pay for all this training and arming of teachers).
   
6. With minimal equipment aside from all the guns and ammo (because again).

Holy shit. You've just turned the education system into a giant prison system, incarcerating children as young (in my state) as three. And, let me remind you, unless you think every single teacher, all 7.2 million of them (according to the US Census), is safe and stable and unlikely to snap, you've put the kids at greater risk.

No. No, no, a thousand times no. If this is your plan, if this is the best you can do, then you really, really, REALLY need not to be firing guns, or carrying guns, or in the presence of guns. You are exactly who should not be armed. Because you're fucking dangerous, out of touch with reality, frothing at the mouth rabid.

And I thank you for showing me how to vote. I will absolutely vote to take your guns away.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

Could you maybe cut this?

I'd like to be able to scroll back down my Reading List for the next 8 hours or so.

[thefourthvine]

Done.

[tei]

Wow. Yes. This. Thank you so much for articulating everything that the rest of us mean when we stare dumbly in horror at the people claiming that more guns mean safer schools.

[thefourthvine]

I just couldn't NOT say it. I got linked to this post that was like, "Let me tell you people how this will become SAFE," and I was like - wait, wait, do you come from my planet?

[melannen]

Yes, exactly.

And, another note: Have you been in a high school recently? Or even a middle school? Or, heck, even an elementary school, if the system is already in a state of disintegration? There are kids there who are angry, who do not think things through, who have been taught that violence is a solution, who would totally shoot their classmates if they could get a hand on a gun...

...and these same kids are the ones who are most likely to get in physical altercations that require them to be bodily separated. By teachers. Who, in your utopia, are presumably carrying loaded guns. Which could very easily be removed from their holsters by said angry, already-being-violent kids that they are in close contact with. No angry teenager would ever think of shooting up a classroom, huh? ...oh wait.

Yes, prison guards mostly manage to keep their guns away from the prisoners. But then you are back to the schools being a prison system, aren't you. yay.

[ellen_fremedon]

And there will be kids who are suicidal. And kids who are bullied and would try anything to make their tormentors back down. And kids who are bullies, and have already escalated their violence or threats of violence as far as they can with their bare hands.

[amaliedageek]

I agree with you wholeheartedly, and that is as someone who grew up in a very rural part of the US, had a grandfather who was a gunsmith and started learning how to shoot (and to handle guns safely) at the age of 10. I wanted to offer this bit of anecdata:

... some states are so desperate for (cheap) teachers they've cut requirements and allow teachers to get certified for teaching over time as they're teaching.

My brother's doing this right now: our hometown district is so desperate for teachers that he's taken over the automotive repair classes at the county vo/tech school, and will start on his degree next fall. He has 30 years' experience in that field -- and, indeed, brought some of the equipment from the old shop to replace outdated gear in the school's work bays -- but he has no formal education past high school.

On the one hand, he's got full-time work after having to close the shop, and his family has health insurance for the first time ever. I am very happy about both of those things. On the other hand, oh sweet Cthulhu no.

[thefourthvine]

I'm happy that your brother has that job, and he'll probably be awesome at it. But, yeah, that doesn't mean we should put a gun in his hands and tell him to be ready to shoot to kill.

[jadelennox]

Holy Mother of God, I've been ranting all the rest of this for days since TN proposed the armed teachers bill, but I'd forgotten about teacher nervous breakdowns -- and yes, my fifth grade teacher had one at us, screaming, crying, opening lockers and flinging the contents and students, ripping papers out of notebooks...

yeah. I'd be dead. Christ on a crutch.

[amberfox]

My orchestra teacher in high school routinely yelled and threw small objects across the room for about a month before competitions. We always came home with awards, but the stress level was significant.

[killing_rose]

While I agree enormously with the sentiment, a point: many (most) rural adults, including teachers, do know how to shoot. In some high schools, for example those in rural Missouri, getting your hunter safety certification is a required part of Shop Class, or was ten years ago.

Part of the disconnect that's occurred is the urban/rural divide in action: Many of those who are coming up with this most probably aren't thinking that we need to teach the teachers. The teachers they know, their children's teachers, they can shoot. They might very well keep guns in their cars. (My teachers did.) It hasn't --and won't-- occur to them that training's needed.

The reverse, of course, is the idea that training would be necessary. Somewhere, my high school biology teacher is looking extremely offended at the idea that he can't hit the broadside of the barn. The moose that my teachers were gifted with more than once, the reindeer that we loved so much, all the things that students and students' parents shared with them (and vice versa)-- they knew we all knew what guns were. I learned gun safety in kindergarten.

People who suggest 'arm the teachers', have, ah, very thoroughly lost their blessed minds, but a not inconsiderable amount of teachers wouldn't need the training, and to say that every teacher would need to be trained is ignoring the lived experience of quite a few people, some of whom are on DW.

If this is your plan, if this is the best you can do, then you really, really, REALLY need not to be firing guns, or carrying guns, or in the presence of guns. You are exactly who should not be armed. Because you're fucking dangerous, out of touch with reality, frothing at the mouth rabid.

I agree with you here. I get that this is a rant of YOU PEOPLE ARE DANGEROUSLY OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY and I agree with you on y'all folks are fucking dangerous and wrong on so many levels that it is terrifying, but a part of your initial premise is wrong. And it's not insignificant.

[scrollgirl]

You make a good point that teachers from rural areas may already know how to shoot. And it's not like I know anything about the kind of training people get on handguns, whether it's simply the mechanics of using a handgun or if it's also a kind of self-defence training. Like, I think there's a difference between training someone how to use a gun that will be fired while hunting or at a shooting range or to defend your home, and training someone how to use a gun for the purposes of defending children 9-10 months out of a year from possible armed attackers. I feel like the second scenario requires a whole different kind of mentality that teachers haven't signed up for--it's what cops do, not teachers.

[staranise]

Yeees.

This whole thing, I just keep waving my arms inarticulately. Also? Guns may not be the best answer. Shooting people the moment you think they're dangerous? Crap, we have cops doing that now! If a parent comes roaring into a school, angry as hell, and then reaches inside their jacket, I think even a trained police officer would have a dilemma: risk killing an innocent (if testy) unarmed civilian, or risk waiting until they've got their gun out?

Also, know what police know how to do? They know how to negotiate. When you've got your gun trained on someone who's about to make some very bad life decisions, it would be really nice to have more options than just killing them. Because in some situations, no, there really is no option but to shoot somebody--but that's not close to the same thing as "all".

(I guess I should give context of: I worked front desk at a high school for at-risk youth. The kind of people whose parents DID come in drunk or high and looking to hurt them, or whose gang fights spilled over into school. I've had to respond to a lot of "Is this a slapfight, or is she about to pull out a knife?" scenarios.)

[thefourthvine]

Yeah, totally. There's other aspects to police training besides shooting people, and it's a complex job, which is why we have specialists doing it and don't try to have any random person on the street fill in.

(Also, yikes! Those are some tough scenarios.)

[bkwyrm]

It is all so fucking scary.
I can shoot. When I got out of high school, I went to work at the Indiana State Prison, as many of us in my small town did. State jobs paid well. I was a visitation clerk for death row - worked outside the wall, did a lot of data verification, worked with a DOS database. All office staff needed to learn how to use guns, for our own protection. In case there was ever an escape. We worked in an office with a gun case on the wall. Just in case.
Anyway, I was 17 when I started there and I learned to shoot with a rifle and a handgun and I can say this: that shit is HARD. It is physically demanding, it requires a great deal of hand-eye coordination and a huge amount of concentration. The secretarial staff was often comforted, after our abysmal scores, by the range master telling us that the prisoners would be so terrified by 30 women with guns that they'd probably run away.

Guns scare the holy living shit out of me. I don't go near them if I can avoid it. I qualified well enough to get out of weekly classes, but just barely. ANd this idea that somehow teachers will be able to do this, that they'll be WILLING to do this, is ludicrous. My local teacher's union has already issued a statement basically saying "Oh hell no." to the NRA, as they should.

As an aside, I've also got little kids, and I live in a city. Our schools are already locked, my kindergartener already attends a school with security guards, and she knows how to do a fire drill, an evacuation drill (in case of a bomb scare), and they practice "intruder alerts" where the teacher turns off the lights and locks the door and they all get under the tables and practice being quiet. My KINDERGARTENER. Who is FIVE. Is already trained in how to behave in case someone comes into her school with a gun.

Sometimes I just want to go hide under something heavy until the world make sense again, but I suspect I might be there forever.

[vass]

When my father was about that age, the drills were to climb under the desk in case of bombing, and they put erasers in their mouths to bite down on. But that was a world war.

[klia]

Sorry, only a sociopathic gun zealot could believe that getting more guns into more hands is the solution. And Wayne LaPierre is just plain cuckoo bananas.

[thefourthvine]

Totally with you on Wayne LaPierre. Dude is seriously out there.

As for the people who are all, "YES LET'S ARM THOSE TEACHERS," I have no idea what they're thinking at all.

[vass]

As if US schools weren't steadily becoming more and more like prisons already.

Two news items I keep hearing over and over:

1. Teacher calls the cops to come deal with a disobedient (but neither armed nor dangerous) child. Police come and put child in lockup until the parents can come collect her.

2. Parents call police on their mentally ill teenager who is threatening to commit suicide but is not endangering anyone else; police come and shoot the suicidal teenager dead.

And hell yeah to your point about teachers having nervous breakdowns. Also teachers with poor judgement, teachers who are lax about safety and maintenance, teachers who want to show kids how cool they are by doing dangerous and stupid stunts...

[thefourthvine]

As if US schools weren't steadily becoming more and more like prisons already.


Yeah. I don't think it will really help our school-to-prison pipeline problem if we turn the schools INTO prisons.

And those news items - yes, and so many more like it, all over the country. Teachers are people, not robots for justice, and they should not be expected to teach AND discipline AND fight AND kill, in part because those are too many jobs for one person, and in part because they call on some diametrically opposed skills and attitudes.

[starwatcher]

.
Yes, exactly. Those who think arming teachers is a valid solution have left logic and common sense far behind, and are living in a Rambo fantasy-world.

A similar rant, from the teacher's POV: I'm a Professor, Not a SWAT Team Member at Shakesville.
.

[thefourthvine]

are living in a Rambo fantasy-world

YES. And, fine, if they want to have fantasies, they can. But they keep trying to make it reality, and that is NOT OKAY.

A similar rant, from the teacher's POV: I'm a Professor, Not a SWAT Team Member at Shakesville.

Excellent post. Thank you!

[missmollyetc]

The mental contortions required to make the sort of statements the NRA is known for has left me in panicked awe for years, not merely that they can promote those ideas, but that they actually seem to view them as solutions and obvious facts.

[thefourthvine]

Yup yup yup. I don't understand how you get to a place where we will never have safe schools until our teachers are armed seems like the obvious truth. It's terrifying.

[andraste]

My dad is a retired teacher - a retired school principal, in fact. He grew up with guns and went hunting with my grandfather many times. And yet, I keeping trying to imagine him using a gun on something other than a rabbit or a fox and failing. He didn't even like shooting ducks! He releases spiders into the wild instead of killing them, for heaven's sake! (We're Australian, so killing rabbits and foxes is a valuable public service.)

He was a great teacher, just the kind of person people wanted teaching their kids. Unless they were expecting him to shoot someone.

[thefourthvine]

I bet he was a great teacher. And I'm not surprised he would have made a lousy sniper. They're just not the same skill sets. It's ridiculous.

[sara]

Amen.

I just pulled my kid out of a kindergarten room where I thought his teacher was simply not able to cope with the pressures of having responsibility for that many five and six year old kids. Talk about people I do NOT want carrying guns to work every day.

And the idea that the great teachers my kids have had should be required to carry guns, or to work in an environment with armed people? It's ridiculous.

[thefourthvine]

Yeah, for sure: good teachers are too busy being TEACHERS to be in the teaching militia; the bad teachers are certainly not people you want to be armed.

I think of my son's teachers, all the ones he's had so far, and they are good at lots of things, from comforting a weeping toddler to teaching kids to count to 100 by fives to making cookies with a group of excitable kids to getting a child so completely covered with paint that I later find it in his nose. But it's really hard to picture any of them happily coming to work with a gun in a shoulder holster. They shouldn't have to. And we certainly shouldn't put them in a situation where they have to kill for our kids, or die for them.

[chalcopyrite]

I never had a teacher have a nervous breakdown, but I was terrified of my third and fourth class teacher. She didn't like teaching, or maybe she just didn't like me, blew hot and cold depending on unknown circumstances, seemed to enjoy reducing me to tears, and just -- I was terrified of her. And I knew stone-cold she wasn't allowed to physically hurt me. If I'd known she had a gun, I don't think I would have been able to make myself go to school.

The other massive, massive assumption the NRA is making, on top of the idea that all teachers are mentally stable and "safe" to be armed around children ffs, is that all of them are physically able. My mother's been a teacher for years. She's a good teacher. She also has extremely poor vision, and since she had cataract surgery, double vision. All questions of willingness and training aside, there is no way she could be a good shot.

(She's also worked with just the kind of privileged, insulated, stupid teenagers who'd think it was funny to try and get hold of a teacher's gun, but that's another rant.)

[bluflamingo]

Yes, to the physically able part (I mean, also the other parts, obviously as well). I'm in the UK, where we don't do guns, really, but when I think of most of my teachers... I can't imagine a lot of them being physically able to pass any kind of firearms certification, even assuming they'd want to carry them, which they probably wouldn't. Which, way to discriminate against anyone with any kind of disability or issue that prevented firing a gun. And presumably anyone with the kind of mental health problem that would have people screaming in horror at the idea of that person being armed around kids - especially since everyone's favourite reaction to mass shootings is 'oh, he must be mentally ill.'

[out_there]

Wow, I really hope no teacher ever loses it.

Yeah, that was my immediate thought here. I remember moving out of a school and hearing about two weeks later how one of the teachers went in and picked a knife fight with one of the *other teachers*. Teachers are people -- who frankly do a job I'd hate to do -- and sometimes they snap. Arming them doesn't make the situation better, but it does add a whole new level of stress and life-or-death responsibility on to a job that's already difficult.

[laurajv]

I keep thinking of the teacher who hurled desks across the room in rage -- my husband's 4th grade teacher. If that woman had had a gun on her, I am pretty sure I never would have met my husband at all.

[icarus]

I hope I don't get shouted down again. I keep trying, keep telling people what will work, as someone who knows "gun" people. (The NRA of course is funded by gun manufacturers so they're not really gun "people," no more than any corporation can really be a "person." And, yes, I do realize that many "gun people" pick up their rhetoric from the NRA.)

Every time we put strong gun laws in place, the gun owners whinge and complain. They chip and chip and chip away at those laws.

We had the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. Then Bush let it expire and Obama didn't renew it. At the state level, I'm told every session about gun laws is packed, and not with gun control people.

What's driving this?

Yeah, yeah, there's the complaint that goes out to the public: "You're violating our 2nd amendment rights! Blah-blah-blah! UnAmerican, outrage, outrage." But that argument never makes sense to me. It's too abstract. And silly. What, we're going to kick down doors and hunt for guns just because we said that, no, you can't have an ICBM in your backyard? It sounds like spin.

What I've noticed is that to each other they make the real complaint:

"Heyyy... no fair! I had to have an anal probe to buy my gun, yet my best friend in (name some weak-gun-law state) bought his (or hers) at the Guns N' Ammo drive-thru."

Since gun law is made at the state level, every state is different. The inequality irritates the gun owners. Then they pack public hearings, find ways around it, support the NRA's fight against minimal laws that, when asked, 74% of them will say are perfectly reasonable. There's a drive to the bottom.

Why? It's this principle at work:

Capuchin Monkeys Reject Inequal Pay

We have to get rid of the inequality between state gun laws. Which probably means a federal law. If we don't, then the chip-chip-chip-chipping will continue.

[lederhosen]

That was one of the big things that happened in Australia in 1996: making gun laws consistent across states.

OTOH, "states' rights" seems to be a much more influential dogma in the USA than it does here.

[kass]

Thank you so much for this post. For saying everything I've been wanting to say, but haven't managed to say. And for doing it with your usual panache, which has provided a much-needed moment of laughter today.

[thefourthvine]

Thank you! And I'm glad you found it funny; I was writing angry, which I almost never do, and couldn't honestly figure out what tone I used.

[naraht]

Holy shit. You've just turned the education system into a giant prison system, incarcerating children as young (in my state) as three.

The scary thing is that, given the way that many schools are run, administered and conceptualized already, this sounds less and less like a shocking development and more like the way that things are going anyway. A slide down the slippery slope towards Foucault's Panopticon: "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, all of which resemble prisons?''

(Perhaps there are limits. But considering that some schools have started requiring students to wear tracking badges like paroled convicts, who knows.)

[norah]

There is actually, in justice and ed policy work, a phrase for something similar to this - "the school-to-prison pipeline" - for how we are preparing a large part of our population not for college and careers, but for a life of incarceration.

[kouredios]

You're right. You're absolutely right, of course. I just have no patience with any of the arguments that accept as a premise that we can't do anything about the number of guns that are already out there. The "arm the teachers" argument, or the "more armed guards" argument. I don't want to live in a police state, thankyouverymuch. How about we argue first about how if there were fewer guns, and they were better regulated, we wouldn't even need to be talking about more guns in schools?

I've seen so many people argue that those of us trying to see fewer guns in the U.S. and banned assault weapons are living in a fantasy land. How is imagining teachers shooting bad guys Wild-West style not a fantasy?

[thefourthvine]

The particular article I was responding to this one, which was recommended to me as being a better solution than the NRA's, for reasons I'm still not clear on. And that article is definitely "when everyone has a gun, that's the safest we can possibly be!" (It's also a painful wad of unsourced, unsupported claims, not to mention a healthy dollup of mansplaining. As I said to the friend who linked me there: this is very informative, but not the way you meant. It's not helping.)

And of course it's ridiculous to me, the idea that what we have now is the minimum number of guns we have to have available, and all future policies must work with that. The way other countries did this is to REDUCE the number of guns in civilian hands. That seems to have worked pretty well. For all of them.

[pocketmouse]

Catholic schools with nuns as teachers.

[thefourthvine]

My father attended one! And I don't think we're going to get those nuns shooting, no.

[laurajv]

FOR REAL ZOMG.

We've talked before about situations where I am dubious that gun control helps (DV, street crime), but mass shooters -- who tend to use legally acquired weapons for which there's not really a good use EXCEPT mass shootings -- how many people have to die, OK?

I don't want anyone taking away my father-in-law's guns that he uses to shoot skeet, or his hunting rifle -- but then, almost no one in favor of gun control measures is suggesting that. Shoot skeet, no one cares. Hunt deer; deer are tasty tasty vermin.

Semi-automatic rifles with giant-ass clips? What the hell are those good for except shooting into groups of people? Nothing that I know of. Fuck those guns.

[thefourthvine]

how many people have to die, OK?

I think the answer, from what I've seen, is as follows:

As many people as anyone wants to kill.

There will never be a number of deaths that makes gun fanatics (I am not talking about reasonable gun owners, here; I'm talking about the "mandatory concealed weapons in preschools FUCK YEAH" crowd) reassess their lives, their choices, and their votes. They want their guns, and if people have to die - if children have to die - if we have to have mass shootings every day in this country - then that is a price they are willing to pay.

[lorax]

Thank you for this.

[thefourthvine]

Thank you!

[alexseanchai]

Cosigned. I'm also laughing about (because the other option is crying about) how the people who insist teachers must carry guns, which implies that teachers are trustworthy enough to carry guns, are dead certain that teachers are not trustworthy enough for collective bargaining.

[thefourthvine]

We're not going to PAY the people we arm to the teeth, are you kidding? That way lies socialism. Or something.

[marina]

I'm from a country with a mandatory military draft. A draft that requires anyone drafted to go through firearms training and many to carry and care for firearms for the duration of their service (2-3 years). Most of the people I know (myself included) have fired an M16 and would have no problem being saddled with a gun again if the need ever arose.

The thought of teachers - or any professionals really who were not cops or soldiers - carrying guns routinely, TERRIFIES ME. The gun laws in my country prevent anyone who isn't in the security business to carry one (and there are still harsh restrictions on that!) and that shit has NEVER BEEN CONTESTED IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE. NO ONE has ever brought up that we should arm [people who work where violent crime happened] as a way to prevent violent crime and MOST PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY ARE CERTIFIED TO USE A GUN.

Basically, as someone who has gun training, as someone who is comfortable around guns, the NRA terrifies me.

[thefourthvine]

THANK YOU. This perspective is super-valuable.

I keep thinking about - was it you who was saying that a while back Israel made soldiers leave their weapons behind went they went home on leave and it reduced the suicide rate? Guns make momentary lapses of reason fatal. They make bad decisions permanent.