Arming Teachers

MarAfter the Robb Elementary Spree Shooting that left 18 children and two adults dead, the debate about arming teachers rears its ugly, stupid head once again, and I want to share my perspective as someone with more than a decade of experience on the teaching side of public education.

So the basic idea is that schools are inadequately prepared to defend themselves should a spree shooter enter the building. The idea often floated to teachers--one that I've been hearing for nearly two decades now--is that they should carry guns, so that they're prepared to shoot an assailant immediately.

Let me first point out that these crimes are rare; most schools will never experience a spree shooting. However, every child at every school will experience any hardening measures we deploy every single day. If you arm teachers, they will be armed every single day, but will likely go their entire career without ever needing to draw their weapons. You might say “so? That’s also true of defibrillators and fire extinguishers.”

Here’s the difference, though: the mere presence of a gun is an opportunity for gun violence. That should seem so obvious that it's practically a tautology, but it's also one that is not necessarily intuitive: most "gun violence" is either accidental or self-inflicted, and by having guns in schools you introduce opportunities for all the dangers of simple gun presence, magnified tremendously by the school setting itself. I just pulled the first link I found here.

Teachers will not practice good trigger discipline. It's not that I don't trust teachers. It's just that I think it's almost impossible in a normal school environment. I'll use police officers as a model for comparison: Police officers spend most of their time in their squad cars or doing foot patrols. This is not a criticism of police, it's simply acknowledging that police officers and their weapons are more isolated from other people than teachers are.

Meanwhile, I spend 30 hours a week in aa 2000 square foot room and during the course of a week I will see more than seven hundred human beings. I am constantly being jostled, bumped, hugged. I once had a frightened child scale me like a jungle gym. I once had a student try to pick my pocket. I am so much closer to so many more people than the average police officer, and every jostle and bump is an opportunity for a dangerous accident if I'm wearing a gun. Now, I'm an extreme case, but most teachers spend all day in a 20x20 room with as many as 25 kids. Feel free to contradict me on this. In New Jersey, 17 state troopers lost their guns in 8 years. Just over two per year, not bad! Granted, that's lost lost, and there's likely no statistic for the number of times officers accidentally leave their guns in a bathroom or leave it on a table but quickly come back for it, just like there's not easily available statistics for every time you've peed in the shower: you're embarrassed and you're not going to mention it to anybody. These kinds of small accidents are probably relatively common, but it's not that big a deal because police officers don't spend their day in a room with ~20 impulsive six year olds.

But it HAS already happened in a public school. At Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School, within two months of the infamous shooting, one of the building's chemistry teachers left a loaded handgun in a public bathroom. A year after that, Florida gave its public schools the option to arm teachers. And I cannot emphasize strongly enough how many more teachers there are than cops: there are 700,000 police officers, but there are 3.5 million teachers. The possibility for accidents is boggling, and the scope of this thought does not even include deliberate