SIZING UP TEACHERS FOR GUN DUTY

President Donald Trump wasn’t the first to suggest that teachers be armed against potential shooters, but he has made the suggestion a part of the national conversation this week in considering what steps might be taken against such threats.

It made us try to remember if there were good candidates to go packing among the teachers, coaches and administrators who populated the schools of our youth.

The only possible one we can imagine from our elementary schools days was the principal. Tall and imposing and the only adult male administrator or teacher for most of our years there, he could effect a stern look and stop an unruly fourth-grader from carrying out the mischief he had in mind.

His very entrance in the cafeteria drew whispers of “LBJ” (Lyndon Baines Johnson, the United States president at the time) and brought immediate quiet to the joint. The principal shared a last name with the then-president and the respect of his presence, but not his initials.

However, he was a kind man personally, a family man and probably not one who’d want to wear a shoulder holster with a gun.

The young music teacher was not the type Trump had in mind, either. Her anger was too volatile. She once saw a classmate leaning back in his folding chair, walked over to him and said, “I hope you fall,” then pushed him over. On another occasion, she shoved the same guy into lockers in the hall, causing his ear to bleed. Once, to get our attention, she hurled a music book from her piano across students’ head and into a set of lockers. Without a doubt, the sound it made got our attention.

Most of the others, with their gray hair, granny shoes and matronly bodies, probably weren’t candidates, though.

Junior high school had a few more men. One of the physical education teachers had a fierce reputation, could pass for a hardened detective on a television series and didn’t mind insulting you if you didn’t raise your legs high enough while doing leg lifts. Maybe he would have volunteered.

But it definitely wouldn’t have been the young, male social studies teacher. The word was, in trying to break up a fight involving a tall, broad seventh-grade girl in a classroom next door to ours, he got the worst of it.

High school probably would have produced more students volunteering for gun duty than teachers. Again, there were a couple of physical education teachers whose tough reputations preceded them — spending part of the period in pushup formation if you forgot your gym uniform, for instance — but nothing we knew then, or later, made us believe they’d raise their hand to carry a gun.

And it definitely wouldn’t have been the milquetoast-y biology teacher, who once told us the only thing he did behind his wife’s back was zip the zipper of her dress. The same man once went through an entire period unaware a leaking, red ink pen had started out as a tiny spot on his pocket and grown to a large spot that covered his entire pocket and made it appear he’d been shot. Naturally, we didn’t tell him until the end of the period.

Today’s teachers may be tougher. They certainly have more paperwork to do, more technology to adapt to and more concerns to keep in mind about individual students. But fitting gun training and firing range experience into evenings and weekends when they still have papers to grade, lesson plans to write and classroom supplies to buy — not to mention a personal life — seems to be asking a lot.

Now, we think allowing student resource officers (SROs) — all of whom should already have firearms training — to carry guns is worth considering, and we’d even entertain the thought of teachers who’d had similar police or military training, and volunteered, to be allowed to have a gun.

But it should not become incumbent on teachers to have to protect their students with firearms. There are other ways involving adding more SROs, altering the way visitors enter schools and installing devices that detect weapons. All are expensive, but none involve scenarios such as six or eight reluctant, lightly trained teachers crossfiring guns across halls in an effort to subdue a shooter.

So, in general, while we don’t favor the concept of arming teachers with guns or sharp-edged music books, there are other strategies worthy of some consideration.