“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
– The US Constitution, 2nd Amendment
Sadly, school shootings are a regular sight to US students; since 1970, there has been a total of 2069 recorded cases of school shootings incidents. There was a combined total of 684 fatalities and 1937 injuries according to the School Shooting Safety Compendium of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Even though the US only accounts for 4% of the population of the world, it accounts for 35% of gun suicides and 9% of gun homicides, according to the pro-gun control Gifford’s law center.
With a hike in school shootings by 124% between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years, the question is as relevant as ever. However, due to the small number of security personnel present on most campuses the question of whether to arm teachers in order to protect students arises once again.
In this text, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities of arming teachers in order to protect their students.
Firstly, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution as seen above grants all citizens the right to bear arms. Supporters of the idea to arm teachers argue that teachers should be able to practice this right in order to protect their students.
In addition to this, teachers may not only have to protect their students; they might have to and should be able to protect themselves.
On a more simple note, arming teachers has financial benefits; arming teachers is plain cheaper than hiring security personnel. As response to the Sandy Hook school shooting, Clarksville School District, which wanted to hire an extra full-time security guard but couldn’t afford to, was able to train 13 volunteer staff and found the program to achieve great results.
Furthermore, it lowers the incident response time. In rural areas, police might need a lot of time to reach the school; an armed teacher can respond in mere seconds, especially if a majority of the staff is armed. To local ABC News affiliate KPRY Ryan Burns, Superintendent of the Northwestern Area School District in South Dakota said “We’re 20 minutes from any police force being able to respond to an event, so with that in mind is one of the reasons why we decided to move forward” when asked about why the district decided to arm its teachers; even the thought of having an armed teacher on site could be enough to stop an uncertain individual from committing a crime.
“The research is clear: gun laws work. The nation’s courts agree: gun laws are fully compatible with the Second Amendment. And the American people have spoken: our weak gun safety laws are killing nearly 40,000 Americans every year. Something must change.”
– Giffords Law Center
On the other side, guns lead to more guns. When more and more teachers freely decide to carry firearms, then other teachers might not be able to decide as freely and even be forced to carry a firearm against their will. In addition to this, the students will be implicitly tought that they need to carry firearms in order to protect themselves and others, no matter what they are told directly.
Another important point is that once a teacher carries a firearm, they are fully liable for it and any incident that occurs due to it.
This places more responsibility and pressure onto the teachers, of which 3 out of 5 already say that they are mentally stressed out. A teacher shouldn’t be responsible for these kinds of problems, nor should they be tasked with protecting their students to this extent.
In addition to this, even law enforcement and trained professionals are exceptionally bad at keeping track of their firearms. There have been at least 65 different publicly-reported incidents of guns being mishandled at school since 2014. One particular bizarre case included a loaded gun falling from the waistband of a teacher that the individual was performing a cartwheel.
Furthermore, in the actual case of an active shooter a gun in every classroom would provide the perpetrator with even more ammunition and firearms. The knowledge of teachers bearing arms would also lead to them becoming targets as the majority of active shooters are students of their target school themselves[^1]. This also regularly occurs to law enforcement officers; between 2008-2017, The Trace discovered that almost 1,800 guns were reported lost or stolen by law enforcement in the United States, including four fully-automatic submachine guns.
Finally, coming back to my original argument and the quote by Gifford’s: Wherever there is a gun, it is going to be used. Guns lead to more guns. The more guns there are, the higher the chance that one of them will be abused by a bad actor.
This is why the only way to reduce school shootings is to introduce stricter gun laws. Supporters may argue that “the bad guy isn’t going to follow the gun laws anyways”, but the fewer firearms there are, the lesser the chance of a perpetrator getting their hands on one.
To sum up, school shootings involving an active shooter have been and still are a great challenge for US citizens. That is why arming teachers might save lives due to them being able to respond to incidents quickly, on the other side, having more armed personnel might even lead to the opposite.
The solution might be somewhere in between; whilst the US figures out their gun laws in an endless debate arming teachers might be a temporary solution to protect US students; however, to me personally, the ethic impact of arming teachers outweighs the benefits in that I may not speak out for it.
One thing is clear though: the only solution to ever-increasing gun violence is stricter laws imposing gun control.
[^1] This information is not directly available on the map but visible from the full dataset also linked on the page.
— Oskar Manhart