Gun proposal doesn’t add up
Why is the answer to school shootings always addition and not subtraction? President Trump’s suggestion to arm teachers does not bring us to the real question, much less the answer: What do we do to ensure our children’s safety?
Last week’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff, has produced an outpouring of new calls for action to stem the ongoing slaughter of our youth. Predictably, some of the first proposals called for adding more guns to our gun-saturated communities.
Within hours of the Parkland shooting, state Sen. Dennis Baxley, a Republican from Central Florida, had prepared a bill to allow school officials in Florida to carry guns. “What we’re dealing with is the fact with a gun-free zone, we have inadvertently made these students a sterile target,” he told NPR on Saturday. “And they enter this campus knowing no one is prepared to stop them. And I’m very interested in what happens in that first five minutes so that we could prevent an incident from becoming a massacre.”
President Trump floated the idea of arming teachers when survivors of school shootings visited the White House on Wednesday. He doubled down on the idea Thursday, saying the idea is to have only teachers with military or other training carry concealed weapons: “20 percent of teachers, a lot,” he tweeted.
Survivors of the Parkland massacre had a different idea. With the sound of gunshots still ringing in their ears, they flooded the Florida statehouse in Tallahassee on Wednesday to demand legislators take action to reduce the number of guns easily available in a state with lenient gun laws. Subtraction, not addition. Teachers are often called on to fix problems that we are unwilling to address as a society — gaps in academic achievement among racial groups, poor health that affects learning stemming from poverty, behavioral issues arising from troubled homes, for example. A call to bring weapons into classrooms deemed a sensible way to tame our murderous gun culture should come as no surprise.
And arming teachers has a clear benefit — for the gun industry. Who pays to supply teachers with concealed weapons? Teachers have spent years preparing to teach reading, writing and arithmetic to children and the math and science courses teens need for our nation to thrive in the new economy. Would they add on credentialing as sharpshooters? Too many teachers are already buying pens and pencils for their impoverished students. Would they need to add “firearm” to their back-to-school shopping lists?
Who bears the legal liability if a student is killed by a teacher?
This idea doesn’t add up and our elected leaders should be ashamed of themselves for trying to persuade the American people that it does.