As a retired teacher, I am opposed to arming teachers. We’ve heard all the pros and cons so I won’t go into most of my reasons. However, on a personal level, one reason is that I wouldn’t be comfortable working where I my co-workers have guns.
Most of the teachers I worked with over a 30+-year career in education were definitely smart and they loved children. They took their jobs seriously, worked long hours, and had (by necessity) great senses of humor. They were my friends and co-workers and I still consider many of them the best people I know.
I can picture a few of them with hunting rifles, calmly aiming at an unarmed deer, but I can’t imagine them with a hand gun in a school, and therefore I can’t imagine they would be able (even with intense training) to react to a shooter in the calm, confident, unflappable, self-possessed manner needed to aim, shoot, and kill before being shot themselves.
No one knows how they would react in such a situation. In my 72 years I have been frightened out of my wits only once, when I was about 20. In that case, I tried to get away and simply collapsed and could not get myself up until the threat was gone.
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But, let’s say that schools choose to train some of their teachers to carry guns in schools.
Do we also have to arm ministers and deacons? night club owners? ushers at movie theaters? country music stars? postal clerks? hamburger flippers at McDonalds? paralegals? elder-care workers?
Schools get our attention, and well they should because that is where so many deaths have occurred and because it is so much more tragic when children are the victims. But the violence is happening everywhere. See CNN’s list of the 34 worst mass (U.S.) shootings:
www.cnn.com/...
The CNN list is presented with the incidents with the most deaths first. I am listing them by the locations of the incidents. The basic stats follow. Note that my list contains more than 34 locations, because some shooters killed everyone at home and then moved on to other venues:
Businesses (corporate headquarters, brokerage firm, law office, salon, machine shop and more): 9 (total killed: 72)
Schools/colleges 7 (total killed: 125)
Private homes 6 (total killed: 35) —a home was not always specified, but when victims were family members, I assumed home. (In several cases a shooter killed only 1 or 3 family members, then moved to other locations with a total of at least 8 killed by each individual.)
Places of worship 3 (total killed: 43)
Restaurants 2 (total killed: 44)
Community center 1 (total killed: 13)
Mall 1 (total killed: 8)
Military base 1 (total killed: 13)
Movie theater 1 (total killed: 12)
Music concert 1 (total killed: 58)
Navy yard 1 (total killed: 12)
Night club 1 (total killed: 49)
Nursing home 1 (total killed: 8)
Post Office 1 (total killed: 14)
Social club 1 (total killed: 13)
Street 1 (total killed: 13)
Unknown (the article didn’t specify) 1 (total killed: 13)
This list doesn’t include incidents with fewer than 8 killed ---and there have been many. It doesn’t include totals of the injured, some permanently. And of course, we don’t have statistics on the emotional or mental damage experienced by survivors, communities, and the families and friends of victims whose lives will never be the same.
I recently read an article by Michael Connelly (journalist and novelist)
articles.sun-sentinel.com/...
about the survivors of a plane crash at the Dallas Airport in the 1980s. One survivor stated that many people tell him he was lucky to walk away from the tragedy, yet the trauma still affected him and other survivors years later.
He said, “Nobody walks away.”