Costly, difficult to arm teachers, experts predict

If America takes President Trump’s advice and arms school staffers to fight off mass shooters, get used to the idea of “alpha” teachers packing heat in the classrooms, gymnasiums and hallways.

That wouldn’t be the only change to get used to, crisis-response experts said Thursday. Arming the nation’s schools would probably be fantastically expensive, requiring that hundreds of thousands of teachers undergo the kind of intensive training that police officers receive.

And despite Trump’s tweeted confidence that it would “solve the problem instantly,” those familiar with armed-response tactics say

there’s no guarantee it would work.

“It might be a great idea, but for a start, the training alone is a nightmare,” said former Berkeley police Sgt. Don Cameron, who teaches police statewide in firearms use. “Teachers will need to do something like police academies to train for this, and they’ll also need to be familiar with not just the gun but the legalities about using deadly force.

“Just like a police officer, the teacher will need to know when to pull the gun, when to shoot and how to be able to hit something,” Cameron said. “And not just hit it. In a situation like that, you don’t shoot to wound. You shoot for center mass to stop the threat. It wouldn’t do any good to try to wing them in the leg.”

That’s a high level of proficiency for trained paramilitary professionals, Cameron said — let alone for teachers who would be trying to shoot straight as students are screaming and the air fills with explosive gunshots.

“If the teacher panics or doesn’t really know how to handle the gun,” he said, “you’ll get random fire with them hitting anything or everything.”

Trump revived the idea of arming teachers after last week’s slaughter of 17 students and staffers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. In a series of tweets Thursday, the president said he wanted “to look at the possibility of giving concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience — only the best.”

The concept has been floated by opponents of gun control ever since the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Eight states now allow staffers to pack guns on campus — California is not one of them — even though teacher organizations generally deride the suggestion. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, calls it “one of the worst ideas I have heard.”

Laura Cutilletta, legal director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said the push to arm the good guys so they can shoot the bad guys would do little besides “sell more guns.”

Steve Siebold, who gives “mental toughness training” to corporate managers and athletes including Boston Celtics basketball players, sides with those who see arming teachers as “a horrible idea.” But he also understands why some people see it as appealing.

“We live in a world where kids are dying and what else are we going to do, on a practical level?” Siebold said.

Given that it now has presidential backing, he said, the concept could gain traction. So how would it work?

“The first thing you do is look for the alpha males and alpha females” to be the ones with the guns, Siebold said. “You’re probably looking at your gym teachers, coaches and the like, which may be stereotypical. But face it, your 65-year-old librarian is probably not going to be interested. You’ll want aggressive, extrovertedpersonality types.”

In his Thursday tweets, Trump suggested that 20 percent of the nation’s teachers could have the right stuff for what he has in mind, and Siebold agreed with that estimate. That would total 650,000 teachers.

Considering that cost of training a typical police cadet is about $6,500, that would bring the upper reach of the training tab to $4.2 billion — although Cameron and others said the full course might not be necessary.

Nate McVicker, president of the Guard911 security agency, said he liked the armed-teacher idea — but that the best combatants against mass-school shooters will always be police officers. He invented the Schoolguard phone app panic button, which instantly notifies other teachers on campus as well as 911 if a shooting begins, with the goal of getting police officers on the scene fast “because most school shootings are over in 5 minutes.” His app is used in 23 states including California.

“If you’re going to arm teachers, the only way to do it is with training, training and more training,” McVicker said. “The only way to stop these people is a good guy or a good gal, and usually in blue. The more we shorten the response time, the more we save lives ... and even though teachers are not a bad idea, most important is that we get school resource officers on the scene.”

Even that is no fix-all, though, as evidenced by the armed school resource officer who was on duty to protect the Florida high school. The officer, a sheriff ’s deputy assigned to the campus, resigned Thursday after investigators found he had been on scene but never went into the school building when the gunshots began.

Another practical issue when it comes to arming teachers: Do they carry guns with them, or leave them locked in a safe until it’s time to use them?

McVicker advocates using safes. Cameron, the firearms trainer, disagrees.

“It doesn’t do you any good to lock the gun up, because by the time you get it out someone could get 30, 40 shots off,” he said.

The drawback to not locking up a gun, however, is obvious — there’s a gun lying around in a school classroom.

“You hear about students fighting with teachers or fooling around with things, and there’s danger in that,” Cameron said.

And then there’s this: Even if campuses suddenly became armed fortresses of safety, there would be nothing to stop a killer from picking off kids after school in the shopping center across the street.

“How do you make every place safe from mass shooters? You don’t,” said Cameron. “It’s not going to happen. That’s the reality.”