Campaign Action
Set aside all the ways arming teachers is stupid. Let’s talk about something Donald Trump at least pretends to be able to understand (even if that too is debatable): money. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump estimates the cost of arming teachers, starting with Trump’s goal of 20 percent of teachers, something he notes would mean that “We’d essentially be adding 50 percent to the size of the military by mandating that three-quarters of a million people be trained and prepared to take up arms to defend civilians.”
A bare minimum training would run $100 per teacher, for a total of $71.8 million. But bare minimum training is not what Trump says he’s talking about. A more extensive training would total $718 million. Trump has mentioned people who are already trained, like those with military experience, but recruiting that many teachers with serious weapons training would have its own costs. And seriously, moving people from a military mindset in handling their weapons into a classroom mindset would in a reasonable world come with training of its own—presumably there are differences between patrolling Afghanistan and standing in front of a classroom.
Then there are the guns:
Let’s consider the Glock G17, which the manufacturer touts as the world’s most popular pistol. It runs $500 apiece, meaning that our price tag for arming our teachers just went up by $359 million. Maybe Glock, too, would give the Department of Education a discount, perhaps cutting the price in half. That changes the total to $180 million.
Our grand total? If we assume the cheapest training and the discounted Glock, we’re at $251 million to arm 718,000 teachers. If we instead assume the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm, the tab creeps past $1 billion.
Go ahead: ask for an extra $1 billion in books and teachers and see what Republicans say about that. The armed teachers proposal is Republican fantasyland, and part of the fantasy—alongside the fantasy that teachers would somehow be more accurate at killing a shooter without hitting multiple students than even police officers are, and the fantasy that armed teachers would act as a deterrent, and the fantasy that police responding to a shooting wouldn’t end up mistaking an armed teacher for the shooter—is the idea that somehow around 750,000 highly trained teachers and high quality firearms would materialize for free.