As a student, I would not feel any safer having armed teachers. Now I know I cannot speak for every student in the entire planet. However, I can express the logical reasons that conclude the fact that jumping into a impulsive solution to arm teachers is a very bad idea.
1. Where is this money coming from?
Teachers (without the extra costs for firearms and firearm training) get paid a ridiculously low wage for the enormous amount of work that they accomplish. Teachers are paid for their time in the classroom, not the countless hours it takes to actually be a good teacher, which requires time outside of the school day. Are we really expecting them to forgo even more of their time and salary to fund training and weapons?
2. A teacher's job is to teach
When I walk into a classroom, I expect the teacher to instill a sense of knowledge and create a safe environment for me to learn in. This means creating a comfortable environment, allowing creativity and different types of learning. Not the ability to whip out a gun and be locked and loaded for any and all emergencies. I would appreciate my teachers to be focused on their job, teaching.
3.Increased anxiety and stress clouds judgment
Firearms in the workplace increase anxiety, this is a logical conclusion. Knowing that there is a possibility of a deadly weapon in the presence of children and young adults immediately makes me nervous. Teachers are not perfect, they are not meant to be trained in combat situations. The amount of pressure a deadly weapon carries cannot be place among the many responsibilities a teacher has, especially when they are under threat of an attack, especially when mistakes can happen so easily, and especially when we are talking about life and death.
4. Confusion in the act of a shooter is eminent
Chaos. One word cannot describe an active shooter event, but if it could, this would be a really accurate one. There is already so much doubt and fear in these situations, why are we increasing the presence of the object that strikes so much fear and chaos within our society? In the event that a teacher does have to use a firearm, will they know which student is to be feared? Will the police know that this teacher is not, in fact, the shooter who has sparked such a tragedy?
5. Liability and morality
I won't begin to attempt an understanding of legal jargon, but I question the difficulty teachers will have towards shooting their own students, as that has been the trend in past school shootings. What are the ramifications of shooting and killing the attacker? And still, if there is no incident, guns send a very powerful message. I fear that if this is our new reality, we will have yet another power complex to analyze.
Regardless of your political views, we cannot be impulsive about the solution to gun violence. There needs to be an open dialogue with the hopes of creating change rather than to prove a political point. No child should fear for their life in school and no teacher should fear for the day they have to shoot their own student. It's a gamble to fight the possibility of what we fear with the weapons that have caused so much tragedy.
