Should Teachers be Armed?

Disclaimer: I am Canadian. This means that anyone this is supposed to address will very likely just disregard it immediately because we should “mind our own business!”.

Sadly I wish we could do that. I wish we could ignore the absolutely brutal choice that nearly half of American voters made last November. I wish we could pretend that the US were in its own little bubble and that the choices their population and government make didn’t affect the rest of the world, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.

So I have an opinion on things they do, and I am entitled to that opinion.

The Problem

This should be obvious to everyone, children are dying in schools in the United States. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that even the people that run the NRA think this is a bad thing.

One thing that is being talked about a lot, and apparently Trump is behind, is arming teachers and even placing armed guards in schools. I’d like to look at these ideas separately.

Let’s Arm Teachers!

Teachers are put in place and trusted to educate our children. To expand their minds, inspire and support them. They never signed up to be bodyguards. Most (I’m assuming here) aren’t weapons specialists. I’m going to assume the vast majority aren’t trained in combat.

So what happens when they are forced into a situation where they need to use a gun to protect themselves and their students? Let’s randomly pick a number out of the air for their accuracy with a gun. I’m going to pick 50% of their shots will find their target.

That, in my opinion and by statistics is a very high hit rate, but just to appease the proponents of this idea I want to ensure I am not erring low.

The average pistol holds 10 rounds of ammunition. So five shots find the target. Where do the other five shots go? In a high pressure, high stress situation, where you have an untrained person firing a weapon inside a classroom that may have as many as 30+ children in it. Where do those five missed shots end up?

This doesn’t seem like a really good idea at all. First of all many trained people that have to shoot someone in the line of duty, police officers, military, etc, are traumatized by the experience. We don’t seem to be hardwired to actually kill other people and shooting someone often ends up inducing PTSD in even trained people.

So not even taking into account the fact one of these untrained armed teachers might actually be the one that kills a, or multiple, students just by missing is the fact that their very mental health may be severely affected.

Let’s Put Armed Veterans in as Guards!

Okay. So we’ve dealt with the untrained part. Veterans were taught how to use a firearm. They were actually taught to kill, although as I said it’s still a traumatic experience for most people, and even better we kill two birds with one stone by employing veterans. So we have a viable solution right?

But do we? Even trained people miss. So you’re still very much looking at the possibility of children dying by friendly fire. Even though that risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact these people at least have training.

Think about that for a second.

A child.
In school to learn.
Dies by friendly fire.
In a first world country.
Not at war.

This Might Actually be an Interim Solution but…

I will admit that this might be an interim solution to school shootings. Regardless of the number of these shootings, and of course both sides exaggerate either high or low to how many there are, the base fact is one is too many.

So even an interim solution is better than nothing right? Of course it is, but the people pushing this idea don’t think it’s an interim solution. They aren’t putting it forward as a “we’ll do this until we get the actual problem under control”. They’re putting it forward as “this will solve the problem!”

If this Solves School Shootings What Happens Next?

So, let’s assume putting armed teachers and guards in schools does actually stop school shootings. That’s great right? Sure it is. The question is what happens to those people that would have perpetrated these atrocities?

Are they magically cured? Do they just say to themselves “well damn, it’s too hard to shoot up my school now so I guess I’ll just forget everything”?

Many of these shooters seem resigned to the fact they are not going to survive their attack, so it probably won’t end all school shootings. The ones that don’t want that, that assume they’ll escape, will just change their target or the means of attack.

“I can’t get IN the school, so I’ll just wait until it lets out and shoot them all from across the street.”

Even if you solve that problem what if they change targets.

Sporting events, kind of hard to protect a field with guards.
Movie theatres.
Shopping malls.
Community centres.

Face it, take away one target and others will just take their place. And unlike the “you can kill people with a spoon” arguments this one is valid. There are lots of places where people congregate, and places where most of those people are children.

But we can put Armed Guards in those places too!

The funny thing is a lot of people that I see that are big fans of the 2nd Amendment are fans because they fancy themselves some hero that will protect their freedoms against their own government.

These same people don’t realize that arming teachers, and putting armed guards in their schools is very likely the first step towards living in a military state. When schools stop being the primary target and you start putting armed guards in shopping malls, movie theatres and community centres. How far away are you from having military patrolling the streets?

This is a Band-aid, not a Solution.

Putting trained and armed guards in schools might be an interim solution (arming teachers is stupid and dangerous), but it is not THE solution. It is something that might be necessary while the United States actually solves the problem, nothing more.

Treating the symptoms while denying the disease exists is how this problem escalated to the point it’s at now.