Last Thursday when I opened my morning email I found this in my inbox:
It wasn't an hour later when we first began to hear the news of yet another mass school shooting, this one in Santa Fe, TX that so far has claimed 10 innocent lives. The NRA (which I am not a member of) has for a while now been advocating for at least some classroom teachers to be armed. As you might imagine this has been met with much resistance from those who claim teachers are trained to teach, not to be armed security. I, too, have had some reservations....until now. Now I'm reluctantly on board with the idea.
One of the main lessons learned from the Columbine school shooting back in1999 is that shooters must be confronted immediately. Back then it took SWAT one hour and 50 minutes to muster, brief, and finally enter the school. The killing was long since over before they got inside. Speed of confrontation saves lives, and that has been the standard police response ever since....the first cop on the scene enters and engages.
I think back to the Dark Ages and the high school I attended. As I recall we had five buildings on campus plus two parking lots, spread out over quite a few acres. Today, due to budgetary constraints, there is probably just one School Resource Officer (SRO) patrolling that same campus. What are the odds of that one officer being in the right building, on the right floor, at the right time, able to respond immediately to a shooter? Now imagine how much better the odds would be if there were five armed, trained teachers or administrators scattered around the campus, plus that one SRO, available to respond? With speed being of the essence, this could save lives!
Of course the key to this is making sure those adults on campus who volunteered were themselves thoroughly vetted and trained. And not just trained once, but subjected to ongoing training until their response becomes automatic. This muscle memory is essential as (so I've been told) when the shooting starts, people suddenly exhibit the IQ of a gerbil. It would be a hefty responsibility these volunteers would take on, and there are serious coordination and liability issues that would need to be worked out, but again, it could save lives!
My state has allowed school districts to permit teacher carry for some time now, but so far I've heard of only a few rural districts who have done so, mainly because they know police response would take too long to do any good. I think this is an idea that, sadly, should be strongly considered by every district. Laws can be passed that restrict this or that, and they might be effective, but confronting shooters will definitely save lives. We can't afford to just sit here and talk about it ad infinitium. We need action.
I'm S, and I approved this message.
The IQ of a gerbil is a real event, I suffered from once. Frequent training of response will correct it. ( practice with unloaded gun )
ReplyDeleteOn Twitter there was a brilliant series of Tweets listing all the problems with trying to arm teachers. Some of the highlights: who is in charge of training the teachers? Who covers the liability insurance? How do police know who's the "good guy with a gun" vs a potential shooter? The point being it's not even 1% as easy as gun lovers want to say. You can't just hand teachers gun.
ReplyDeleteAnd in this case it's important to note a police officer, a real "good guy with a gun" who was trained and everything was badly wounded and did not stop the shooter. If he couldn't you think some rando with a gun is? Enough with your John Wayne/Clint Eastwood/Charles Bronson fantasies.
Oh Pat....there you are my little sacrificial victim friend. I personally would send you in first to burn off some of the shooters ammo, enabling John, Clint, and Charles to get in position. :) 1, Law enforcement handles all training, both initial and continuing, and certifies the competence of the volunteers; 2, Liability insurance is paid by the school district coupled with a statewide "Good Samaritan" law to cap liability. This would be less expensive than tripling or quadrupling the number of SRO's. I suspect local businesses would happily financially partner in the program, too; 3, Just as now, all responders would be in communication via radios; 4, The "good guy with a gun" that you don't seem to think much of engaged and pinned down the shooter for 45 minutes (?) while the rest of the school was evacuated with no further loss of life. Engaging a shooter ASAP works, just as law enforcement said it would.
DeleteAnd you must understand the the volunteer teachers and administrators would not supplant law enforcement, but serve to quickly locate and report back where the shooter was, and then at least contain and possibly even engage UNTIL PROPER LAW ENFORCEMENT ARRIVES, which would probably be within 5 minutes. Then the volunteers would fall back and assist with safely evacuating the rest of the school.
DeleteTHere are a million reasons why people like Pat can site to rebut your plan. To them the only solution is to take away and or register all guns...hmmm can't think of any issues with that.
ReplyDeleteI have no issues with qualified personal being armed in school or at least or maybe better the expectation that there are armed person ell, much like few airplanes have marshals, but which ones do?
I believe that the first step is to assure anyone entering school has the credentials to do so...we had to show Firm Id to enter our office building agter 911, second all bags or people should be checked (or the reasonable expectation of the possibility of being checked) to simply keep guns out of school. Yes Pat that might be expensive, how much is a child's life worth. They do a pretty good job of keeping guns out of sporting events, and Disney World they could do the same at schools.
I'm completely on board with limited building access, ID badges, walk through metal detectors, universal gun purchase background checks, etc. Still, having more than one set of "boots on the ground" in a school seems like a good idea, too. Law enforcement definitively says confronting a shooter ASAP will save lives, and 5 or 6 properly trained set of boots can surely locate and respond to a shooter somewhere on a large multi-building campus faster than one SRO can.
DeleteI respect and value your opinion enough that I'm now considering this as a possible option. You certainly listed a number of really good arguments for arming a number of teachers.
ReplyDeleteOf course, they will be paid more - right? And they'll be trained how to handle a class of 35 terrified little kids while identifying and disabling an active shooter? And they hopefully won't have any mentally disturbed teenagers in class who will take their guns from them while they are focused on teaching.
Not dissing your ideas, just thinking. There's a lot to consider.
More pay, sure. I think they would definitely deserve it. I'm not sure if it would even be possible to handle a class of 35 terrified kids in the face of an active shooter. The best way to calm them it seems to me would be to neutralize the active shooter ASAP. And in my scenario the armed teachers would carry concealed so that the students wouldn't know which adults were armed and which were not. To them every adult in the building(s) might be armed, which might by itself act as a deterrent.
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