Bulletproofing schools: Feel-good move or foolhardy?
Bulletproofing schools and arming teachers is a “do something” response to outraged citizens. Such actions may feel good but have little potential to make children safer. In fact, positioning guns inside schools creates the same scenario as unsecured guns in homes — the opportunity for intentional and unintentional shootings, too often by children themselves.
It’s fantasy to imagine teachers quick-drawing weapons, dropping into a shooter’s crouch and taking out a gunman. Soldiers can attest to the likelihood of surviving an assault weapon attack when armed with a pistol. Landing a shot is difficult, as we witnessed at the Tops Grocery slaughter when a veteran officer fired 11 shots and failed to take down the shooter. That officer was killed by return fire. We’d all like to believe we would summon the courage to confront a shooter, but the reality is multiple officers in Uvalde sworn to “protect and serve” did not.
Unless every teacher is armed, the well-prepared shooter will have “cased” his target and chosen a classroom with an unarmed teacher. This leaves teachers — who will be lightly armed and not wearing body armor — to take on a body-armored shooter who has an assault weapon. Shooters are irrational, not stupid; they don’t need access to buildings since students assemble outside, at predictable times, every day.
There’s also the problem of where to keep weapons. It’s difficult to pull off a Bruce Willis-style maneuver with your gun locked in a desk. But mixing unsecured guns with children is a deadly scenario, as we’ve learned from all the “self-defense” weapons left unsecured around curious children, resulting in accidental killings of siblings, neighbors or themselves. Or in the armed teacher scenario, a classmate. According to a report by Everytown for Gun Safety, 70% of unintentional shootings by children occur at home.
Perhaps teachers could keep weapons on their hips? That’s an image: A teacher leaning over to help with a problem with a gun at a little girl’s eye level. As for older students intent on murder, they’ll no longer need to get guns into school: Just sneak up behind a teacher, grab the gun and start firing.
Gun violence in the U.S. far exceeds levels in any other developed nation. We know why. Any rational effort to curtail mass shootings must include restricting access to guns.
In the name of public safety and saving lives, we must demand that elected representatives stop kowtowing to those under the spell of the NRA’s ad campaign. We need strong laws that make sense, not more people with guns. Educators aren’t blind and neither are parents. As one teacher succinctly put it, “Because politicians refuse to limit access to assault rifles, you expect me to sign up for combat duty and protect the kids you haven’t.”
Putting political ambition ahead of children’s safety — and lives — reeks of sulfur. The sacrifice is too great.