We don’t need arms races within the United States. But we have them. We need arms control in the United States. But we sorely lack it. The gun rights fundamentalists are trying to weaponize every part of American life, including schools. There are actually people, including Donald Trump, who want us to seriously consider weaponizing schools by arming teachers. This is the most dangerous school-related idea I’ve ever heard. It won’t make children safer and it will undermine public education.
Teachers should never be armed. Simply imagine the number of things that could go wrong and you know, based on simple statistics, that they will go wrong. Arming teachers in the name of security and freedom will simply put millions of children in more danger by putting more children in closer contact to more armed people. If we know anything about American firearms exceptionalism, it’s that the exceptional presence of guns leads to the exceptional level of gun deaths. More guns in schools will cause more children, teachers, administrators, staff, and school visitors to be killed by guns.
I’m about to ask a bunch of questions. They are based on reading I’ve done across social media, in papers and web new platforms across the political spectrum, and based on talk from political leaders over the last week. But let me be clear: none of these questions need to be answered because no teacher anywhere should be armed in a school. The answer to our children’s safety and our civic safety is to limit the number and kind of guns we allow people to carry and who can and should be able to own and use these guns.
There are a host of questions we can ask that show that arming teachers is an ill-conceived and immoral idea. Let’s get going.
Who will pay to arm teachers? Who will pay for the gun? The ammo? The kevlar vests, helmets, and the kevlar security shields? Do children get those defensive measures too? Or perhaps, just like teachers do for pencils, papers, books, movies, and other necessary items, that’ll fall on the teacher.
Who pays for training to use all these things? When are teachers and administrators expected to do this? In all their spare time? During the summer? How will this fall into their professional development and their continued certification requirements? Even if it’s not mandatory, how will those thing be reconciled?
If it’s not mandatory, what’re the criteria for a teacher to carry a weapon? Should they go through some sort of military or police-based training? How extensive should that training be? Who will foot the bill for target practice? Will class sizes be reduced so that teachers have smaller groups to defend? Will we pay teachers salaries at least in excess of the police for having to be superhuman–both people who act in loco parentis and servire et protegere. Will their pensions exceed that? Where will that money come from?
Who pays for the liability insurance? How do we pool the cost of risk from this arms race? As one teacher posted on Facebook, what happens when a kid breaks the lock and steals the gun out of a desk and shoots another student, a kindergartener accidentally pulls a trigger when students are on the floor, or a gun falls out of a holster and accidentally discharges?
What about when a teacher kills a student in the course of “friendly fire” when they engage a shooter? What if they think a student running into a classroom is actually someone coming to hurt them and they shoot and kill? Highly trained police officers make this mistake? You think an undertrained teacher isn’t going to do the same?
Will we the taxpayers foot the attorney’s bills?
And what about a rampaging teacher? That is a predictable inevitability of arming them.
Who pays the teachers’, administrators’, or janitorial staffs’ families disability or life insurance when more teachers are maimed or die “in the line of duty”? As one teacher wrote on Medium, “I did not sign up to be ripped apart by a spray of bullets that came from a semi-automatic rifle. At the end of my teaching contract, it says that I will perform ‘other duties to be assigned.’ I do not interpret these words ‘as bleeding to death on the floor of my classroom.'”
More to the point, what do those deaths do to the witnesses? To the students? To families? Who is liable? How does a community reconcile that their kids were the predicted collateral damage of arming a teacher?
Wayne LaPierre’s, the NRA’s, and Donald Trump’s proposal to arm teachers is practically criminally insane. Schools are places to nurture the minds, hearts, and relationships of young people so that they can lead happy, healthy, and productive lives in a free nation. Forcing them and their educators to live in a weaponized institution is to guarantee the miseducation of the American public. And I think that’s part of the point.
If you wanted to destroy American public education in the pursuit of the privatization of all things, you would make schools unsafe. Just think about it. The people who want to gut the funding of a free, fair, and excellent system of public education are proposing a massive increase in required spending related to weapons in schools. Surely, millions of parents would immediately withdraw their kids from public schools in protest.
At the individual level, it makes sense. No sane parent would want their kids in constant proximity to guns with the expressed design of killing other human beings. The “learning environment” would be more like a forced demilitarized zone or prison laden with anxiety, potential murder, and less learning. Flight makes sense. The pooled consequence would be the destruction of public schools by flight and inevitable taxpayer revolt.
I, for one, would immediately pull my son from the public school. I’d have to continue to work and maybe he’d have to come with me to work for the foreseeable future and learn what he could on his own as other parents and I worked out home schooling schemes.
So this is at least a two-headed dragon. On the one hand, it’s the gun lobby holding more guns to the heads of our schools and our children–almost literally. They are insanely arguing that the Second Amendment somehow trumps the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that our children are entitled to through school. And on the other hand, it’s a brilliant and pernicious weapon for those who wish to privatize schools. Just as the Tea Party argued that government is the enemy and then took it over to prove that they could make the government your enemy, the school privateers love the guns in schools lobby because they can use it prove that schools are failing by making them fail.
Lest you think it’s completely nuts, think about the DeVos family. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been attacking public education for decades. Her brother, Erik Prince, is at the helm of Blackwater, one of the most powerful private military contracting corporations in the world which profits directly from the weaponization of private life. If teachers won’t fill in, who would? Hmm. Maybe private “security” agencies ready to advance the gun lobby’s interests and become the new merchants of death disguised as our children’s saviors. Destroy public education and make a few billion bucks doing it. Genius.
The real solution lies in at least two places. First, we have to keep guns out of all schools except by trained law enforcement, and by law enforcement I mean police as they are now. Second, we have to pass common-sense and widely popular gun control measures including universal background checks, assault weapons bans, bumpstock bans, magazine capacity limits, gun show loophole closures, and such. I have plenty of friends who hunt with rifles and shotguns and a few who are trained pistol marksmen/women. Those people could pass through a system of stringent and well-conceived regulations that ensure individual and public safety. They would do it. Even if they didn’t want to, they should have to.
We have to end the civilian arms race within the United States. For too long the gundamentalists have hijacked our society, demanding that we weaponize every part of American life. Now they’re trying to do it to schools. It is an all-out assault on our schools, one so dangerous that an enemy foreign power would wish for it.
Did I mention that Erik Prince is part of the Russia probe? That’s probably just a coincidence though.
Peter Walks for Democracy 