I won’t carry a gun in my classroom

The following is an excerpt from a commentary in the Washington Post by Victoria Barrett:

Several years ago, I taught a student who seemed capable of shooting up a classroom. He radiated contempt for me, his classmates in my college freshman composition class and the assignments, muttering about the stupidity of his peers and rolling his eyes when they spoke. His writing displayed a generalized hatred toward women and violent fantasies involving hypothetical, gruesome gun crimes against cheating girlfriends.

If anyone in the 17 years I’ve taught college might have shown up with a firearm, this student was the one.

So far, this sounds like a viable argument for arming teachers, an idea that bubbles up after every school shooting in this country and one that U.S. President Donald Trump expressed support for on Wednesday. But my fellow teachers and I did not enter this profession to be security guards. And if this proposal becomes a reality, we will not have safer schools. We will have confusion, possibly more tragedy and an exodus of educators at a time when our country can’t afford it.

If it’s my responsibility to shoot someone to protect 25 others, I will have been drafted unwillingly into an ideological army to protect the rights of some civilians to own and operate military-style weapons. And I will not be conscripted.

I will never kill for a civilian’s “right” to own a military weapon. Perhaps, like the draft dodgers of my parents’ generation, I’ll have to leave for a country where the laws make more sense. Anything to avoid the addition of “taking a life” to my job description, when that job is supposed to be about preparing young people to thrive for the rest of theirs.

Our job is to teach; the job of legislators is to pass laws that serve the public. None of us are required to entertain a “solution” to school shootings that only stands to serve the interests of the gun lobby, not our students.