By Adam Kelly | Echo
Reynolds High School, Oregon; Taft Union High School, California; Seattle Pacific University, Oregon; University of Central Florida, Florida; New River Community College, Virginia; McNair Discovery Learning Academy, Georgia; Santa Monica College, California; Sparks Middle School, Nevada; Arapahoe High School, Colorado; Borrendo Middle School, New Mexico. All the mass school shootings since Sandy Hook Elementary, Connecticut.
Sandy Hook was in 2012. Three years may seem like a long time ago, but there shouldn't be any school shootings.
These attacks have targeted young children and adults, elementary schools and colleges. Due to so many shootings, schools now have to choose how to protect students. They are happening often enough that people are figuring out the best way to protect students.
When a shooter stalks the halls of a school, what if the police can't respond in time to apprehend him or her?
Guns could be given to people who are already on the scene: the teachers.
But a student could find the gun, even if it is in a teacher's purse or desk drawer. The teacher may be moving the gun and an accidental discharge could occur. (Three of these accidents have happened since Sandy Hook, according to Politifact.)
USA Today stated over 80 bills were introduced to 33 states in 2013 to allow teachers to carry guns in classrooms. Only five states signed a bill into law. The rest did not approve the right for teachers to carry handguns into schools.
That means the teachers in Texas, Alabama, Kansas, South Dakota and Tennessee who are carrying guns into schools don't have divulge the information to administrators. They don't have to tell other teachers, students or parents, either. Police arrive on school grounds after the alert about a shooter and discover two guns discharging instead of one. The police then don't know which gun belongs to the shooter.
Teachers can better prepare themselves through correct training on handling guns, especially under stress. But however stressful staged shootings might be, nothing can compare with the intensity of a shooter storming the halls on the other side of a classroom door.
Shooters cause chaos. Teachers are under enough stress between comforting students and enforcing lockdowns without personally facing down gunmen.
The training doesn't outweigh the risks; the risks are too high. These risks make me believe that teachers carrying guns is the wrong choice.
Too many innocent lives are at stake. It's better to ask questions now than to answer friendly fire later.
