[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

[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]

The mentality thing is pretty huge. Cops and soldiers have to be taught how to deliberately turn off their empathy and dehumanize the people they kill, or they're traumatized like there's no tomorrow. Teachers have to be taught how to empathize, even when kids are being shits or having tantrums. You can't just switch from Mindset A to Mindset B in the time it would take to respond appropriately to this kind of threat.

[amberfox]

And if you can, I'm kind of worried for you. Dissociation is a coping mechanism, but that doesn't mean it's healthy.

[snarp]

Yup. I'm a former teacher from rural Appalachia; I do not know how to use a gun, don't want to, and would refuse to do any job that potentially required it of me. The suggestion that it was somehow the teachers at Sandy Hook's responsibility to be armed, and thus that they failed their students by not going in to work everyday prepared to kill one of them, is disgusting.

It doesn't matter whether some teachers know how to use a gun or not - to suggest that it's somehow our responsibility to act as jailers or agents of law enforcement is completely fucking crazy. I was there to teach the kids, not kill them.

Also: I personally would not feel comfortable even having a gun in the same room as a my students. They're kids, their brains are still growing, and they're going to do stupid crap sometimes. That's how they learn. I do not want my personal kids doing their personal stupid crap around items that tend to put an abrupt stop to all learning when you do stupid crap with them. We already get too many of that kind of death around here, just due to parents leaving their guns lying around the house, as people invariably do in an environment in which the presence of guns is ordinary and unquestioned. The number of accidental deaths caused this way in schools would unquestionably be more than the number killed in school shootings, even if this nonsensical plan did prevent any such shootings.

[soc_puppet]

Ignorant city-dwelling layperson is curious, if you have the time/inclination to get into it and if it's not too off-topic: Are there any particular restrictions to gun access based on proximity to other people/households? I'm going back and forth on this one mentally and am wondering if there's already anything in place/any general opinions on it.

[elf]

City person who spent much of teen years in rural Arkansas here: every family had a rifle; most had more than one.. (I mean, I'm sure that's not literally true. But it was what I expected.)

Most families hunted. Not so much for necessary food, but the local schools scheduled a day or two off at the beginning of turkey season and again for deer season, because failure to do so would result in ridiculous absentee levels during those weeks.

Kids thought of guns as potentially dangerous but very useful tools, like the big kitchen cleaver or an automobile. Were people accidentally killed with them? Sure, and that was a great sadness. Did some people get stupid or vengeful and use them to deliberately kill? Sure, but that's no reason to take them away from everyone else. Did kids misuse them? Sure, sometimes; some kids will misuse anything.

Banning guns is given about as much serious thought as banning cellphone use in the cities because of the accidents caused by txting while driving.

And until the dialogue about guns* acknowledges the drastically different circumstances between rural and urban settings, it's going to continue to go nowhere useful.


---
*And other weapons. Everyone had a pocketknife. I, a geeky, feminine, decidedly non-physically-oriented preteen & teenager, had a small folding pocketknife. An attempt to ban "weapons" at school would be met with about the same reaction as an announcement that the school was going to ban shoelaces.

[ilyena_sylph]

Preach it, hon.

*hugs*

[elf]

Moving from middle-class suburbs in CA to rural Arkansas to inner-city CA was fascinating.

I am baffled at how the people I know now react to the existence of guns. I don't shoot; I have fired a gun I think twice in my life (once as a teen; my stepbrother insisted; I fired into the woodpile and my hand hurt for the rest of the day; once as an adult, a black-powder renfaire gun at a training exercise). I have no interest in having or using a gun, nothing but the vaguest ideas of safety or maintenance... but I can't believe people get ALL FREAKED OUT over guns, but not cars.

Cars kill a lot more people in the U.S. than guns. Cars get mishandled a lot more, have more accidents from bad maintenance, are owned and used in violation of the law (my state requires insurance, which a lot of people don't carry), and there's no movement to remove cars or restrict their ownership by psych evaluation, just a constant string of demands to spot the individuals most likely to misuse them, and remove those people's access.

I want guns to be treated the same way: Presume that almost everyone is *likely* capable of using one safely, require some training and licensing to get that permission, and have a long list of acts that can remove that permission, based on statistics about likelihood of danger to others.

And they don't belong in classrooms "in case of shooters" any more than police vans belong on football fields "in case of riots." Being able to construct a situation where that would be the perfect tool does not mean that's a useful allocation of resources, nor that there aren't hundreds of other potential situations where the tool just makes everything worse.

[fleurrochard]

I'm not from the US, so I won't get into this discussion any further, but only about this:

but I can't believe people get ALL FREAKED OUT over guns, but not cars.

Cars kill a lot more people in the U.S. than guns.

I'm pretty sure that indeed more people are killed by cars than by guns in the US, but there is, in my opinion, a very important difference: guns are built to harm (whether in defence or in offence), cars are not. Can you harm with them? Of course. But they're not built with the intention to harm.

[scissorphishe]

I can't believe people get ALL FREAKED OUT over guns, but not cars.

I personally find it baffling how blase people are about cars. (My father once told me, "You know, [scissorphishe], it's really not necessary to hold your breath every time you come to an intersection." BUT INTERSECTIONS ARE FULL OF DANGER. Places with a bunch of moving cars are ALL full of danger!) Guns and cars are both incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous, and I wish my fellow gun-fearing people would stop treating me like an alien or a sadsack shrinking violet just because cars freak me out.

Here is a difference between cars and guns, though: private citizens have access to weapons designed for the army. Weapons designed to kill human beings. Weapons that are beyond anything you might need for hunting turkeys or deer. When there are people going into schools and mowing down children with armored tanks, then we can talk about how unfair it is that people want to restrict guns but not motor vehicles.

[soc_puppet]

My thought process for restricting gun access based on proximity to other humans/households (closer = more restrictions, farther away = fewer restrictions) goes approximately like this:

PROS:

* People living closely packed together will generally be more stressed by one another than people living with greater distances between them

* People living in smaller communities are more likely to think of the people around them as actual people (Dunbar's number/monkeysphere?)

* The farther away you live from other people and the fewer people you see in general, the fewer people there are to shoot

CONS:

* Horrible racist connotations! I don't think that POC are inherently more violent than white folks, but the GOP basically builds its platform on the opposite idea. If the conservadouche collective ever thinks of this, some sort of proximity-based gun restriction stuff could actually get passed, but I have no doubt that they would frame it as "Keep guns out of the hands of those scary urban POC!" More gun control would be nice, but I would feel seriously icky if that's the reason we actually got it. Because ew.


I was at an event once where a Republican state-level congressperson spoke about how one of the (at the time few) things he seriously disagreed with his party on gun control, and he specifically said it was because he lived in a large city. The concept of proximity-based gun control has been kicking around in my head since then, but very rarely at the forefront of my thoughts. I think it could actually work as a viable proposition, but I've been seriously educated on my own white privilege since I first thought of it and the GOP positively reeks of racism.

[elf]

I think the term you're looking for is "population density," not "proximity." It's not a matter of how close your neighbor is but how many neighbors live within a mile of you. (My zip code: 13,000 people/sq mile.)

And yeah, there is pretty much no way to discuss that concept without dealing with the fact that people of color historically got shoved into tiny crowded areas of large cities, and since those are the areas with the most crime and violence, a whole lot of racist people think that's a function of race rather than population density and urban cultural stresses.

Potentially: change the dialogue from "population density" to "education." A great deal of the crowded urban areas are low-education... but so are a lot of rural areas. Argue for better training requirements for gun ownership, mandatory safety measures (gun locks etc), a demonstrated ability to describe the care, maintenance and usage features of the gun, a background check free of signs of violence or tendencies to misuse dangerous equipment (throw DUI in there)... the results would still come out "most inner-city residents shouldn't have guns" but they'd also say "a lot of rural people don't seem to be careful enough to be trusted with a gun, either."

I think the discussion could be shifted from demographic politics to personal responsibility by insisting that anyone who can't be bothered to stay sober while operating a two-ton 60MPH pile of metal in public, shouldn't be allowed to handle projectile weapons either.

[ilyena_sylph]

I. I love your brain.

That is a fantastic idea.

[amberfox]

My mother's family is rural. I learned to shoot at 12, my sister at 10. My sister is one of the best shots in the family, and one of my mother's older sisters was very nearly tapped for FBI sniper training. (Apparently she failed the psych test.) We have also come to the conclusion that part of knowing how to use a gun is knowing when not to, so for assorted reasons we don't currently own any. (My son is bipolar, my sister suffers from depression, and my hands shake so badly these days my aim is ruined.)

On the other hand, I don't think my mother has fired a gun in her life. I'm not sure she's ever even picked one up to put it away. So you never know.

(Incidentally, the local procedure for getting rid of ammunition is turning it in to the police. The look on the officer's face when we opened up the file box we'd had to wheel in because it took two people to lift it was adorable. I kind of wish I'd gotten a picture.)

[thefourthvine]

I did say that some teachers would already be good with guns! I just don't think they'll be in the majority, and - even teachers who hunt, who own guns, who are good with guns, even they would likely need some training to become what amounts to a sort of civilian SWAT team member. I just don't think the skills used in hunting are perfectly commensurate with the skills involved in analyzing a dangerous situation and responding appropriately. But I could be wrong!

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

Yup, it is. So, so terrifying.

[sara]

There are real differences between the training necessary to go hunting and the training necessary to carry a gun in a classroom. It would be necessary to train everyone. And that would come at a not-inconsiderable expense to school districts which are already getting it in the teeth from recession-borne budget cuts.

It'd be a lot more reasonable to regulate civilian firearms use, as provided for in the Constitution.