U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- After the murders in a Florida public high school, President Trump said we should allow some school staff to be armed. The Socialists were entirely predictable in the way they responded. They projected their personal fantasies onto armed teachers. That isn’t necessary because we don’t have to fantasize about what will happen when school staff are armed. We already know how armed teachers behave. We have armed teachers in schools today and have collected several thousand man-years of experience. Those facts don’t stop the detractors.
- With one breath the progressives said that school attacks were a new epidemic of dangerous proportions. Then they said that school shootings were so unlikely that an armed teacher would probably never be needed.
- Opponents of armed staff said teaching is an honorable and valuable profession so teachers shouldn’t have to carry guns..but if we did let teachers go armed then they would probably go nuts and shoot someone.
It is too easy to make fun of the talking heads, so let’s look at the facts instead.
10 states allow licensed gun owners to carry on college campuses. Some allow school staff to be armed and some prohibit it. As you would expect, nothing happened and you can’t remember which states allow armed staff and which states forbid it.
We put more armed teachers in K to 12 schools after the murders at the school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. We armed teachers for the same reason we put some armed pilots in planes after the 911 attacks.
Before the murders at Sandy Hook, well before the murders at Parkland, some states already allowed armed staff in K to 12 schools. No teacher has ever been ordered to carry a firearm in a school, but some school districts looked for teachers who already knew how to live with a gun. They quietly asked if teachers had their concealed carry licenses and were already carrying outside of school. Some teachers were asked to take additional training and to carry on the job.
That training costs money, and most districts haven’t put physical security into their district budgets. Fortunately, a few private organizations raise funds to train teachers. Unfortunately, the training slots fill up in minutes as thousands of teachers compete for hundreds of training slots each year.
I’ve called them teachers, but that is an overly simplified shorthand. These armed volunteers come from every position, from bus drivers to district superintendents. They come from every grade level, from pre-K to 12 grade. They work in every kind of school, including charter schools, private, religious and public schools. They are all volunteers who take self-defense and medical training during the summer.
We can look at the two examples I mentioned to understand why staff want to be armed. In both the Sandy Hook and the Parkland attacks, teachers used their bodies as human shields to protect their students. Teachers already knew they would run toward the sound of gunfire. They wanted to protect the people they loved at school the same way they protect the people they loved at home.
They wanted to be armed at school because they want what we want, a chance for them and their students to survive.
Today, we don’t have to guess how staff would react if they carried a gun at school. We already know. These volunteers already knew their jobs with the school. They had already lived with a gun when they were off campus. We’ve accumulated many thousands of man years of experience with armed school staff in the last few years. Call it dozens of lifetimes of real world wisdom. We get more experience every school day and it never makes the news.
The school staff carry concealed, and what is out of sight is out of mind. The sheriff and the school board knows, but parents and students don’t know which teachers are armed.
We know that teachers don’t go nuts when they carry on campus. Believe me, the media would have made sure we knew about that if it ever happened, but it never did.
We don’t have to guess what happens when teachers are armed. We already know. The people you trust with your children live up to that trust..every single day.
I know one thing about armed teachers. They are in our schools today. I know there will be more of them tomorrow.
About Rob Morse
The original article is here. Rob Morse writes about gun rights at Ammoland, at Clash Daily, and on his SlowFacts blog. He hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast. Rob is an NRA pistol instructor and combat handgun competitor.