It is a partial solution to school shootings, at best.
It is a partial solution to school shootings, at best.
T his past Sunday, the New York Times’ leading piece was “Trained, Armed and Ready. To Teach Kindergarten.” The article details what teachers are doing to protect themselves and their students from mass shooters, specifically, seeking out firearms training and lobbying school districts to allow staff members the option of concealed carry.
Sarah Mervosh writes for the Times:
Mandi, a kindergarten teacher in Ohio, had already done what she could to secure her classroom against a gunman.
She positioned a bookcase by the doorway, in case she needed a barricade. In an orange bucket, she kept district-issued emergency supplies: wasp spray, to aim at an attacker, and a tube sock, to hold a heavy object and hurl at an assailant.
But after 19 children and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, she felt a growing desperation. Her school is in an older building, with no automatic locks on classroom doors and no police officer on campus.
“We just feel helpless,” she said. “It’s not enough.”
She decided she needed something far more powerful: a 9 millimeter pistol.
The Right is particularly bad at messaging about its solutions following a mass-shooting event. Talk radio, cable news, and the average commenter repeat the tired line, “More people should have been armed.” If it’s a school shooting, we amend the lament: “Teachers should be armed.” I understand that the suggestion is a counter to the Left’s “No one should have guns,” and agree the latter prescription is unproductive. (We simply have too many firearms in circulation to ever significantly reduce their availability, not to mention that bit in the U.S. Constitution.) But the Right’s prescription is a partial solution at best.
To be fair, the idea of arming teachers does make some sense; after all, we would be giving the most likely victims of such shootings a chance at successfully defending themselves and their charges. However, the likelihood of such a stratagem working as intended is extremely low, while the possibility of accidents, mishandling, or theft is high.
Best-case scenario: Alarms blare — active shooter in Riverdale Middle School. Mrs. Jones, the seventh-grade math teacher, with a preternatural calm, pulls a Springfield 1911 loaded with .45 ACP from the small of her back or opens a fingerprinted safe behind her desk. The shooter opens the classroom door, and Mrs. Jones has the wherewithal and training to operate the handgun and put seven of seven rounds into center mass, killing the gunman before any evil is done.
Worst-case scenario: A disturbed student or intruder learns where Mrs. Jones keeps her firearm and takes it — or overpowers her and takes it — using the weapon to harm himself or others.
Most likely scenario: Mrs. Jones locks her firearm in her desk, with ammunition in another drawer, to prevent students from stealing her gun. Those drawers are haphazardly filled with educational detritus, as is the way of teachers. Years later (for school shootings are statistically exceptionally rare), an active-shooter situation happens. Whether the shooter can be stopped ends up being a gamble with poor odds: The likelihood that Mrs. Jones is able to access her firearm in time, that the gunman chooses her classroom to barge into, and that she’d be willing and able to use her handgun in the vital first three to five minutes of such a situation is exceedingly low.
There may well be a place for volunteer response squads composed of staff with arms and body armor securely stored in a break room or office — but getting to the gear takes time. Allowing concealed carry for teachers entails serious risks that must be weighed — not to mention the cost and time demands of training civilians for combat. In the Navy, I qualified on the M500 shotgun, the Beretta 9mm, and the M4A1; I was trained in room-clearing, night shoots, and responding to an active shooter. Four years later, I can plink a target, but in an active-shooter situation, I’d be of no more use than some guy off the street. Skills, knowledge, and marksmanship deteriorate, and it takes money, time, and dedication to maintain even basic competency.
To be clear, I’m not against the concept completely; kindly stay your pitchforks. But let us not kid ourselves: Students will know who’s carrying. Students know everything there is to know about their teachers’ habits and mannerisms. The educator at the front of the classroom is studied by dozens and sometimes hundreds of pupils every day. And it’s one of those young ones who will most likely be the shooter that storms the school one day, knowing which teachers carry and how to avoid them. So even the purported soft prevention of “unknown carriers” is suspect.
We must be realistic because student safety transcends partisanship. School shootings are rare, yes. But they are acts of terrorism and cause outsized harm to the national psyche. The best, most immediately viable way to prevent mass shootings is to stymie them before a shot is fired.
Increasing the time it takes an attacker to enter a school building or similar institution, forcing him through multiple layers of passive and active fortification (defensive concentricity) while reducing police response time (with such technologies as the RAVE app), is vital and could reduce casualties. From Columbine to Uvalde, we’ve known what must be done: deny entry and get police piled on the shooter.
Deputizing schoolteachers and staff is a last-ditch, “we’re really in the sh**” move that reeks of a failed state if that’s all one suggests we change. Flippantly opining that an educator should act as a “Dirty Carrie” with a holstered Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum on her hip is irresponsible, lazy, and an obfuscation of viable solutions that do not disarm law-abiding citizens while protecting students and the public.
I know this to be a subject of intense debate, so please let me know your thoughts and experiences at label@nationalreview.com. Educators and law enforcement especially are encouraged to email me, as this is a subject that I will continue to write about.