After the school shooting in my adopted state of Florida, the state legislature acted by proposing an increase in the minimum age for purchasing a rifle, a three-day waiting period on rifles, and a program for arming teachers. Teachers can elect to participate in the program and there has been some talk of providing financial incentives. Since Florida consistently underfunds education, this does have some appeal to poorly-paid teachers.
As would be suspected, pro-gun people and the NRA generally favor arming teachers while those who are anti-gun oppose it. It is also not surprising that many in the middle are not enamored of the idea of arming teachers. In general, teachers do not seem thrilled with the idea.
While people tend to line up on this issue in accord with their ideology, the matter should be given due consideration in as objective a manner as possible. I will endeavor to do just that, with focus on both the practical and moral aspects of the matter.
From a purely practical standpoint, the main question is whether arming teachers would make students safer. Under this broad consideration are various practical concerns. For example, one obvious concern is whether an average teacher who lacks military or police experience would be able to operate in a combat effective manner against likely attackers. On the positive side, school shooters tend to be inexperienced and untrained—as such, a teacher with some training would probably be equal or better in skill than the typical attacker in a school setting. On the negative side, school shooters tend to use assault rifles, and this would give them a firepower advantage (range, accuracy, damage and magazine size) over teachers armed with pistols. But, a pistol is still better than being unarmed.
As such, an armed teacher would be objectively better than an unarmed teacher in terms of engaging a shooter. But, the engagement would not be like a shootout in a Western, with both gunslingers facing each other across an empty space. It is likely the engagement would take place with students all around and this raises the concern that the armed teacher will miss the shooter and hit students. Even trained professionals tend to miss most pistol shots in an active engagement; a teacher with some basic firearm training will presumably miss more often. This leads to the practical and moral question of whether this engagement would make students safer than not arming teachers. The practical matter is an empirical question: would an armed teacher reduce casualties by either taking out the shooter or keeping their attention long enough to allow more people to escape or would they increase the body count by wounding and killing students with missed shots? We will presumably have some data on this soon.
The moral concern is probably best put in utilitarian terms: if there is a reduction in deaths due to armed teacher intervention, would this outweigh unintended injuries and deaths caused by the teacher? On the face of it, a utilitarian calculation would find the action morally good, provided that the teacher’s actions saved more students than not having an armed engagement. However, there is still the non-utilitarian moral concern about the possibility of teachers unintentionally killing or wounding students they are trying to save. But, on the face of it, I would be inclined to say that engaging a shooter would be the right thing to do, even if there are the inevitable unintentional casualties.
If the concerns were limited simply to the engagement, then this matter would seem to be settled. However, there are the concerns about having armed teachers during all the times in which they are not engaging shooters. After all, their guns will not just magically appear in their hands, nor can they have guns safely locked away to be issued during an attack (that would be too late). The teachers would need to be carrying their guns while on school grounds. This leads to a host of rather obvious practical and moral problems.
One obvious problem is the possibility of accidental discharge. While not common, people do accidently fire concealed weapons while digging about in a purse or adjusting their holster. The risk of accidental death and injury needs to be weighed practically and morally against the effectiveness of armed teachers in combating shooters. Since each gun is a risk every minute it is present (I say this a person who has had guns my entire life), it is not unreasonable to think that the risk of having armed teachers outweighs the risk of not having armed teachers to respond to a shooter.
Another obvious concern is someone getting their hands on a teacher’s gun, such as a student grabbing a gun when a teacher is trying to break up a fight. 23% of shootings in hospitals involve guns taken from security officers; the same problem would apply to schools. This must also be factored in when assessing the moral and practical aspects of the matter.
There is also the worry that an armed teacher will be mistaken for a shooter when the police arrive on the scene—in the confusion of an engagement, the police will have the challenge of sorting out the good guys with guns from the bad guys with guns, which could prove problematic. As such, armed teachers run the risk of being shot by the police or even other armed teachers who see the gun but do not recognize their colleague in the heat of the crisis.
One concern that some will regard as very controversial is the worry that arming teachers will put black and Latino students at greater risk. The gist of the worry is that because black and Latino students already tend to be treated worse than white students, they will be at greater risk of being shot by teachers. This concern is often coupled with worries about stand-your-ground laws that allow people to use deadly force when they feel threatened. This concern does extend to white students as well; an armed teacher might feel threatened by a white student and pull their gun. It would be terrible and ironic if armed teachers ended up killing students rather than protecting them. While most teachers, like most people, are not inclined towards murder, the possibility of students being wounded or killed by armed teachers is worth considering.
To close, assessing the morality and practicality of arming teachers requires weighing the risks of arming teachers against the benefits of doing so. Based on the above discussion, the one advantage of arming teachers is that they will have a somewhat better chance of stopping or slowing down a shooter. Weighed against this are the many disadvantages noted above—disadvantages that include the possibility of teachers and students being wounded or killed.
One rational, but cold, way to approach this matter is to weigh the odds of a school shooting against the odds of people being harmed by arming teachers. While exact calculations of odds are problematic, the odds of a shooting incident in any K-12 school in a year in the United States has been estimated as 1 in 53,925. For high schools, it is 1 in 21,000. For elementary schools, 1 in 141,463. While these calculations can be questioned, school shootings are statistically quite rare given the number of schools and numbers of students. This does not, of course, diminish the awfulness of shootings when they occur. But, when weighing the risks of arming teachers, it is a critical concern. This is because arming teachers would be a good idea (practically and morally) if the good outweighed the bad and determining this requires estimating the odds of a shooting, the odds am armed teacher will stop it and the odds of the various harms of arming teachers occurring. If a reasonable calculation shows that arming teachers would create more good than bad, then arming teachers would be a good idea. If not, it would be a bad idea. Perhaps this cold calculation might be countered by an emotional appeal, such as “if only one student is saved by an armed teacher, it would be worth it.” To this, there are two replies. One is that good policy is not determined by emotional appeals but by rational assessment of the facts. The second is an emotional appeal: “would it still be worth it if one student died because of armed teachers? Or two? Or ten?” My view is that arming teachers, given the odds, is a bad idea. However, I am open to evidence and arguments in favor of arming teachers.
Distance learning. Online education. The time has come. Neil Postman would weep.
The first step is to realize that the police can’t protect you. There is simply no time. Also, the police have no duty to protect you.
So we are on our own. How do we protect our kids? I think at least allowing teachers to be armed would be a reasonable first step. I would not force a teacher to carry a weapon, but if they are so inclined I would let them.
Many schools have on-site police, so they can respond (though, as the recent shooting shows, they might not).
I’m reasonably sure that the police do have a duty to protect citizens; but perhaps “protect and serve” is false advertising.
WASHINGTON, June 27 – The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html
They still have a moral duty.
The language by which this issue is defined is unclear at best, biased or even inflammatory at worst. I think that if you are going to offer an objective analysis, you really ought to define the parameters of the argument.
So what, exactly, is “Arming Teachers”? We hear that phrase over and over – does it mean all teachers, or just some of them? Do they have a choice? Is there any training involved? Is there some kind of “station” where arms are handed out? And who does this “arming” – the state? The municipality?
There have been objections to this, some stated by you, that either choose to not understand or deliberately misrepresent the proposal being considered. If you are going to be objective, you at least need to present a clear, factual premise to argue either for or against.
So the fact is that it’s not really “arming teachers”, in the sense that guns aren’t handed out at the door; teachers are not required to participate and those who do have to undergo a significant amount of scrutiny, background checks, and training. The goal is, as stated by those making the proposals in your home state, “about ten armed teachers per school”. They would be partnered with, sworn in by, and deputized by, local law enforcement.
Nor is it a requirement. Many teachers have spoken out on social media and in the news saying things like “I am a teacher, not a police officer or bodyguard”. But no one is saying they have to volunteer. Others feel differently, others want to go through the training so they can protect their own lives and the lives of others if the time comes. Some teachers might say, “I am a teacher, not a paramedic”, while others would gladly go through CPR and extensive first-aid training and consider it part of being prepared for their job.
What is “a significant amount of training?” Your argument says “some basic firearms training”. Your word choice seems to imply training along the lines of, “Here’s a gun – this is the safety; hold it with both hands and squeeze the trigger …”
In fact, the proposal calls for 132 hours of training, which, if taken all at once during a regular work schedule, would be about 3 1/2 weeks of full time. In comparison, aspiring police officers in Florida undergo 110 hours of weapons and self defense training at the academy – which includes familiarity and marksmanship with a variety of weapons, decision-making skills, and judgmental use of force. In New York State, the police weapons training is about 90 hours, and the training continues with semi-annual or annual 5-hour “refreshers”. I don’t know for certain (and the legislation hasn’t even passed yet), but I would imagine that teacher-training would have to include this kind of refresher.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/1/17059248/florida-legislatures-arm-teachers-gun-control
(I love the way unbiased articles like this begin with “The Republican-held, pro gun legislature” – presumably just in case the readers don’t want to slog all the way through the article – they can make their judgment right at the start. To the author’s credit, though, he does deliver the facts.)
Please don’t get me wrong here – I am not advocating for or against armed teachers in schools; I am merely advocating for a clear representation of facts without nuance.
The other fact that really needs to be discussed is that this has never been talked about as the solution, only a part of a wider one. In Florida, the “School Marshall Program” (much better than “Arming Teachers”) is considered to be a last line of defense, after everything else has failed. It is part of a larger program that includes extending the waiting period before firearms are purchased, and raising the eligibility age to 21, the banning of bump-stocks, the implementation of laws that closely resemble the “red flag” laws in other states, and increased funding for mental health screening and school resource programs.
The point then, is, not to have some kind of Wild West Shootout in our schools, but a last-resort, if all else fails, desperate measure to limit the amount of damage done by a shooter between the time he fires his first shot and the firing of the one that takes him down.
Unfortunately for any kind of statistical analysis (but fortunately from a humanitarian perspective), we will really never know if any of this works. School shootings are very rare – and even though they get more press than other shootings, there is no way to compile statistics in enough volume to be able to reach a conclusion. George W. Bush once said about terrorism – “We have to be right all the time – they only have to be right once”.
This debate is really an exercise in futility. There simply isn’t enough data to support or oppose any solution reasonably, nor will there be no matter what we do.
” We will presumably have some data on this soon.”
Not likely. There have been about 40 of what could be classified as “mass shootings” at schools since 1960. For the purpose of this post, I’m using what others have used – a shooting at a school that involves more than four victims, whether they have been killed or injured – not counting the shooter.
Forty incidents over almost sixty years simply is not enough data to identify a trend, let alone a solution. Some involved handguns, some bombs, some shotguns. Some involved legally obtained weapons, some illegally obtained – some, in hindsight, showed disturbed individuals who should have been flagged and others left us all wondering how that person could do such a thing – having shown no outward signs.
14 incidents involved students under 21. A small handful were gang-related drive-bys. Several were older (40 + years) attacking students on athletic fields. Another few were staff members at the schools. Many of these incidents took place on college campuses.
If the public schools in Florida adopt the “School Marshall” program – that fact alone will not prove a thing one way or another. If there are no shootings in ten years in any of those schools, it doesn’t mean the program worked – nor if there are no shootings in the same period will it prove that the program didn’t work. If there are two schools – one with the marshall program and one with out – if either of them have an incident, it will simply mean nothing.
The only way we would ever be able to discern anything factual would be if there were an attempted shooting at a school where there was a trained, armed staff member on site at the right place and the right time, who was able to stop a shooter before damage was done. Or if that staff member were targeted, or if he shot and missed, and hit a student. The likelihood of gaining any data like this at all is extremely slim.
So we are limited to respond to our passion, to retreat to our “Pro-Gun” or “Anti-Gun” corners and put all of our energy toward feel-good measures that address only a minute segment of the overall problem of violence in this country.
If teachers are armed and there is a large enough sample size, we will be able to get (in theory) some good data on the risks of armed teachers. This assumes data will be collected on accidental discharges, use of force by teachers and so on.
You are right to note that shootings at schools are relatively rare; hence getting statistically significant data will be a problem in terms of teacher effectiveness. That said, individual incidents will provide some useful information.