Letter to the Editor: Should Teachers Have Weapons?

I don't think that teachers should have guns because teachers are not meant to have guns, they are meant to educate. However, I think a better idea is to have handheld taser pistols; they are non-lethal, cheap and easy to use. If you gave teachers guns, somebody could wrestle them to the ground and take it from them. However, with a taser they are non-lethal so they can’t be used against us to kill.

To use a gun, teachers would have to have hours of training to be accurate enough and know how to fire and reload, who’s gonna pay for all these hours of training? Not the government; I'm sure they are already taking billions of dollars out of the education system. The NYPD trains for days to become good cops and their hit percentage is 34%. Think about it-if a teacher had a gun, (most likely) they have never had a gun in their hands in their life what if they missed and hit a student? What if the gun misfired? When a school shooting takes place, the teacher could freeze up.

At the last school there was an armed police officer on campus and he didn’t do anything he froze and didn't go inside, this was a armed guard who had trained for numerous hours for this exact situation and he didn’t do anything, so in the same situation how would a teacher react? You can't say because you have no idea how it feels to be in such a situation. People play videos games and say “oh yeah I’d totally jump up and attack him, bang bang right? He's dead I win” but in a situation it's not like video games or cop shows, there is fear and people don't react quickly.

Guns and children don’t mix. To fix this problem the best solution is to make getting guns more difficult. Giving teachers weapons is like putting a band-aid over a broken bone. There need to be stronger background checks. It needs to be harder for psychos to get their hands on a gun. Right now any old guy who has Alzheimer's or schizophrenia can buy a gun. I want to be able to leave my house and not worry about being shot at school. Are people’s rights to buy a gun more important than children’s lives? Are my rights to go out and buy a gun more important than 20 kindergartners executed at Sandy Hook?

Since when are we the land of the guns? We are the land of the free, I should be free to be able to go to school without worry. People always say “Oh it will never happen to me” but it can, you have no idea how many psychos there are out there. So when you think “okay to solve this problem we should arm teachers” think about that a bit more, do some research, figure out if arming teachers is the right thing.