European research sees folly in arming teachers

BERLIN — At first, the hourlong President Trump meeting with students who survived last week’s Florida school shooting appeared to be an open discussion about ways to stop the killing. In Europe, it reminded some stakeholders of how they first began to brainstorm ideas after a devastating string of school shootings between 2002 and 2009.

“Does anyone have any idea of how to stop it?,” Trump asked, after survivors and advocates had delivered powerful testimonies at the White House event that was broadcast live.

But the search for “any idea” that could stop the shootings quickly led to a familiar proposal — and one that is extremely risky, according to those who have spent years successfully trying to prevent similar shootings in Europe on behalf of their governments. Trump did not make any conclusive promises at the end of the meeting, but as the conversation moved on he appeared to favor arming teachers themselves.

“Whoever hopes that Trump will seriously restrict gun laws will likely be disappointed,” wrote Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine in a story published online. “In fact, the opposite may happen. Apparently, Trump believes to be able to create more security at schools by adding more weapons,” Spiegel’s Washington correspondent summarized in disbelief, before citing NRA donations to Trump.

Normally staid Germany news agency dpa published an article similarly critical of Trump’s proposal under the headline: “Trump and the logic of the lobby,” remarking that the idea sounded “as if the powerful weapons lobbying group NRA had dictated it to him itself.”

Herbert Scheithauer, one of Germany’s primary experts on the issue and a psychology professor at Berlin’s Free University, called the U.S. debate “absurd.” He warned that arming teachers could lead to more violence, as some students already at risk of committing a shooting may see the armed resistance as a challenge.

“Based on academic research, we know that the presence of firearms can trigger dangerous reactions among certain people. Instead of deterring them, weapons may actually trigger violent fantasies,” Scheithauer told The Washington Post on Thursday. He said the idea of arming teachers would be “unthinkable” in Germany.

“Given that there are such great concepts to prevent school violence in the first place, I really don’t understand why the idea of arming teachers is discussed so prominently, even though we still don’t even know whether it would have a positive impact or lead to the deaths of even more students,” said Scheithauer. His team, under the umbrella organization Networks Against School Shootings (NETWASS), has tested a preventative approach at over 100 schools in Germany, starting in 2015.

“There are ways to spot students’ unusual behavior long before they become shooters,” said Scheithauer, who said that the German experiment was a success. Similar experiments have been launched in the United States, too, and would only have to be expanded. So, why is the United States now debating armed teachers instead of the implementation of prevention methods that have been refined and documented for years?

Advocates of arming U.S. teachers may argue that Europe has still far fewer weapons in circulation than the United States, and that America’s rural schools are especially hard to reach in case of an emergency. But in Europe, opponents of providing teachers with arms will quickly point to Switzerland, which also has one of the world’s highest ratios of firearms per person and remote village schools. The country has similarly debated measures to prevent school shootings, but it has favored more comprehensive measures over easy-fix solutions, such as storing weapons in classrooms. So far, no student has gone on a shooting spree there.

Apart from training teachers to detect possible signs of a willingness to commit a shooting, some Swiss police departments have also introduced software designed to spot unusual behavior online. The software, developed by the University of Darmstadt in Germany, was introduced in the region of Solothurn in 2013, an official there confirmed on Thursday. Hundreds of officials in regional agencies are trained at interpreting the automatic results that spot unusual posts on social media or other content published online.

“I appreciate the point on arming teachers; it’s not something I personally support,” one participant said Wednesday. “Rather than arm them with a firearm, I would rather arm them with the knowledge on how to prevent these acts from happening in the first place. How do you identify the kids in your class that are most at risk?,” she said.