About guns and classrooms

Introduction

Columbine, in 1999, wasn't the first school shooting, but its 15 dead and 24 injured, and the drama surrounding it, certainly caught everyone's attention.

Sandy Hook, in 2012, wasn't the first elementary  school shooting, but its 27 dead, an unnecessary and altogether preventable number, also caught everyone's attention.

Virginia Tech, in 2007, doesn't register in many people's memories, maybe because it was at a university, and all of the victims were legally adults, even if they were students. But its 33 dead should catch everyone's attention.

And now in 2022, Ross Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas, adds its 19 dead and 2 injured to the list.

These are only the landmark school shootings. Many more, while still horrifying, and memorable to some, are largely ignored or forgotten by everybody else.

My Chuck Norris moment

I was a schoolteacher for two years, starting in 2006. It was only seven years after Columbine, and it was seven years before "Run-Hide-Fight". Active-shooter drills were a regular part of school life, and we had several of them throughout the school year. That is to say, while we didn't have "Run-Hide-Fight", we had the "Hide" part down pretty well.

Columbine showed us, and other incidents confirmed, that adults in the school -- teachers -- were likely to get killed early in an assault. One would think that, with the adults out of the way, it would be easier for the shooter to pick off the kids.

Every time we had an active-shooter drill, I would hide all 30 kids in a corner of the classroom. I would turn off the lights, and I would lock and barricade the door. Then I would position myself between the silent students and the door, as close to the door as I could get without being seen.

I am, emphatically, not a macho he-man type. But this, I figured out on my own: if a shooter were to crash his way through my locked and barricaded classroom door, I would go Chuck Norris all over him. If I was going to die anyway, I would go down fighting. Forget trying to talk him down -- it hadn't worked for anybody else. If I could do anything about it, the shooter would die before I did.

I never told anybody about that. But at the end of my second year, I was chatting with some of  the boys in my class. I found out that these 12-year-olds had already guessed that I would do something like that, and they had agreed among themselves that they would back me up with chairs, desks, and anything else that they could use as weapons. They knew that their lives were on the line as well. If they were going to die, they would make the gunman pay for it.

Arming teachers: Guns in the classroom

After every one of these incidents, someone again proposes arming the teachers -- having the teachers carry a gun, presumably in a holster on their person, in the classroom. While I was a teacher, I thought long and hard about this. Let me give you my thoughts about a teacher packing heat. I will speak as if I were still a teacher in a public school.

First of all, I'm not against it. I am not against guns. I am not against authorizing teachers to be armed. And I am not against allowing teachers to carry a gun in the classroom. 

BUT.

I am against requiring teachers to be armed.

Furthermore, if you want me to teach with a gun on my hip, then you had better pay me both a teacher's salary and a deputy sheriff's salary. If I'm going to do the deputy sheriff's job, in addition to my own, then I want to be paid for it.

Not only that, but if you require me to carry a gun, then you'd better pay for the gun. And the ammo.  And the holster. And the paperwork. That money is not coming out of my pocket.

Moreover, you'd better pay for my training, and for the hours I spend at the shooting range, practicing so that I can be as proficient with the weapon as I am with my standards-based curriculum. The training must include basic firearms training, specific training in the firearm I am carrying, and how-to-shoot-an-armed-attacker-in-a-realistic-situation training. 

You -- meaning my principal, my school district administration and board, my state board of education and legislators, the voters of this state, and the parents of my students -- had better take that gun and my shooting abilities as seriously as you take my teaching abilities.

And based on what teacher salaries are in this state, you don't take my teaching abilities very seriously. That had better change as well.

I signed up to be a teacher, not an armed guard.

An alternative to arming our teachers: fortify the schools

If you're not willing to pay for all of that, then spend the money to make our schools more secure. 

Give us more on-site armed guards, who constantly patrol the buildings and the grounds, and don't just spend all day in their office, eating donuts and watching the monitors.

Require each teacher, staffer, and student to have a smart-chip photo ID card with them at all times. Don't let anybody into the building without one.

The efficacy of metal detectors has been debated, but still, have metal detectors and X-ray machines for bags and packages at every entrance. If we have them at airports and courthouses, why not have them at schools as well?

Make sure outside-access doors are always locked.

Put effective crash barriers in strategic locations, so an attacker can't ram a vehicle into the building to gain access.

Surround the schools with a security fence, with locked gates or active barriers, just like we have on military bases.

Turn our schools into fortresses. Ignore the fact that, from the inside, they will look like prisons.

Do you object to fortifying the schools? Really?

If you don't want to fortify the schools, then you must turn to a political solution. More than twenty years of ongoing school violence have demonstrated that our governments have neither the courage nor the integrity to do anything about it. We have been asking for a political solution since Columbine, and even before then. It will never happen.

Fortifying the schools is a bandaid. It doesn't fix the cause of the problem. To fix the cause requires more courage and integrity than our current crop of politicians possesses. To fix the cause, two things must be done.

1. Eliminate easy access to guns. I know that most school attacks in China use knives, not guns. But this isn't China.
2. Fix whatever it is that causes people to mount these kinds of attacks. Get rid of the bullying, the shunning, the family dysfunction, the radicalization, the loneliness, the hopelessness, the frustration, the rage, and all of the other contributing factors.

And it's not about immigrants

I'm speaking to the anti-immigrant faction in this section: It's got nothing to do with immigrants. 

Klebold and Harris were white, upper-middle-class kids, and all of their victims were likewise white, upper-middle-class. Same with Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Springfield. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the perpetrator was white, and the victims were Amish, whose ancestors first immigrated to North America in 1715 -- long before your ancestors got here.

Save your immigration-related talking points for some other time. They don't apply here.

Conclusion: final thoughts

Simply put, as a teacher, I will defend my students to the death. I will do my part. But I expect society to do their part.

And remember, I got hired to teach, not to kill -- to build up, not to break down. That's all I want to do.