[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[melannen]

Yeah, I mean, these people seem to have forgotten why we have no-guns-in-schools rules. It isn't to keep outsiders from causing massacres, it's because if there are guns in schools, a student will inevitably use one to shoot people.

Yeah, my uncles used to bring shotguns to school to go hunting afterward, too, but the schools my uncles went to were a completely different set of circumstances (in terms of available adult supervision, and just plain size) than most of the ones I've spent time in, even the ones in their hometown. (Their old high school building now houses one of the town's four elementary schools.) Also, back then, kids sometimes got shot.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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...

[bkwyrm]

Actually, prison guards don't carry guns. They have mace and billy clubs. They don't carry guns because the chance is too high that a prisoner will get ahold of one. At least, that was the case when I was working in the prison system.
Which should say something about the wisdom of arming teachers, I think.

[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.

[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.
.

[malka]

It's not just the angry kids, either. I still remember the time that I kneecapped a friend of mine when I was thirteen or fourteen. It wasn't on purpose -- it was insufficient impulse control plus sports equipment. I was a "good" kid. (She's fine, by the way. It caused her pain but no permanent damage.)

Admittedly, I was on the impulsive end of the spectrum, but I don't think I'd have been safe to handle a gun, no matter how much training I had, until well into my twenties. It certainly would not have been safe to have me as an impulsive, clumsy, curious, and kinesthetically-inclined child around guns all the time.

(Yes, we had kitchen knives and scissors. After an incident when I was a toddler, my parents got very firm on knife safety. Among other things, kitchen knives did not leave the kitchen.)

[melannen]

Yeah, you'd pretty much have to train all the kids in gun safety, too. From preschool. And it would have to be really damn effective gun education, which I am pretty sure it would not be. Is that really something we need to be spending our limited education time and money on, given priorities?

(Actually our local NRA did once try to get the state legislature to mandate gun instruction in the public schools. It went down in flames, fortunately. Not that I'm opposed on principle, but considering they'd recently stopped offering driver's ed, for funding and liability reasons, and thinking about whether more teenagers are killed by guns or cars...)

[thefourthvine]

Done.

[melannen]

Huh. Clearly I had not done the research there! Yeah, that only makes the case more strongly.

(I would not arm teachers with billy clubs or mace either. Possibly less so, the temptation is greater when it's theoretically nonlethal. And that speaks from the experience of having been one.)

[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?

[thefourthvine]

I haven't been in one recently, but I remember mine, and even though we were in a well-to-do suburb, there sure were a lot of angry and troubled kids there, because TEENAGERS ARE LIKE THAT. God help us all if we add guns to that mix.

[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.