An alternative to arming teachers…Con mucho gusto
An alternative to arming teachers…Con mucho gusto
We are struggling to make sense of the senseless violence in an elementary school in Connecticut. Good people all over the world are thinking about how to prevent another tragedy and coming to very different conclusions. A friend, a devoted father, said he’d been thinking. “So, what’s wrong with just arming a few teachers in every school? When bad guys know there’re guns around, they stay away. I’ve got lots of guns in my home. My house is the safest place on the block.”
I took a deep breath. I reminded him the “bad guy” in Connecticut wasn’t a burglar. He was a crazy person with a death wish. I reminded him that tragedies like Connecticut were amazingly rare in a school, but what was amazingly common in a school were situations of kids fighting and angry parents chewing out a teacher for a kid’s not making the team or even students confronting a teacher with threats.
How would schools be safer with a few teachers facing those everyday, stressful, sometimes volatile situations with a loaded gun? I reminded him that the Army’s response to the horrific shootings at Ft. Hood (where, one might argue,
