Following their “good guy with a gun” mantra, Republicans often respond to school shootings with proposals to arm teachers. While there is some public support for these proposals, most Americans are not enamored of the idea. Teachers, with some exceptions, tend to oppose these proposals. As a necessary disclaimer, I’ve been shooting since I could hold a gun and shoot it safely.
While people line up on this issue based on their ideology, it should be given an objective evaluation in terms of practicality and morality.
From a practical standpoint, the question is whether arming teachers would make students safer. Under this broad consideration are other practical concerns. For example, an obvious concern is whether an average teacher would be able to engage and defeat a shooter with a reasonable chance of success and survival. School shooters tend to be inexperienced and untrained and a teacher with some training would probably be as skilled as the typical shooter. But school shooters tend to use assault rifles, and this gives them a firepower advantage in terms of range, accuracy, damage and magazine size. This assumes that teachers would be armed with pistols. But some would argue, a pistol is still better than being unarmed.
So, an armed teacher would be objectively better than an unarmed teacher when engaging a shooter. But the engagement would not be like a shootout in a Western, with gunslingers facing each other in an empty street. The engagement would probably take place with students in the area, making it possible that a teacher will miss the shooter and hit students. Even trained professionals often miss pistol shots in an active engagement and a teacher with just basic firearm training will 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 and allowing more people to escape? Or would they do more harm by wounding and killing students with missed shots? If teachers are armed, we will be able to collect data on this.
The moral concern is 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 if they had not been armed. However, there is the moral concern about the possibility of teachers unintentionally killing or wounding students. But engaging a shooter would seem to be the right thing to do, even if there are unintentional casualties.
If concerns were limited to the engagement, then this matter would be settled. However, there are obvious worries about what harms might arise from having armed teachers in schools. Their guns will not magically appear in their hands when needed, nor can the guns be safely locked away for use only during an attack. The teachers would need to be carrying their guns all the time. This leads to a host of practical and moral problems.
One problem is accidental discharge. While not common, people do accidentally fire concealed weapons while, for example, digging in their purse for their phone. The risk of accidental death and injury needs to be weighed against the effectiveness of armed teachers. Since each gun is a risk every minute it is present, 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 concern is someone taking 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. It would be ironic and awful if a school shooter used a gun taken from a teacher.
There is also the worry an armed teacher will be mistaken for a shooter when the police arrive. In the confusion of an engagement, the police will need to instantly distinguish the good guys with guns from the bad guys with guns. Armed teachers run the risk of being shot by the police or other armed teachers who see the gun but do not recognize their colleague in the heat of the crisis.
One concern that some will see as controversial is the worry that arming teachers will put black and Latino students at greater risk. 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 must be considered.
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, 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 by armed teachers.
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 rare given the number of schools and numbers of students. This does not diminish the awfulness of shootings. But, when coldly weighing the risks of arming teachers, it is critical. This is because arming teachers would be a good idea (practically and morally) if the benefits outweighed the harms. Determining this requires estimating the odds of a shooting, the odds an 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.