Imagine your fourth-grade teacher. Remember their demeanor and their gentleness and the many duties they faced in trying to herd and instruct a group of 10-year-olds.
Or think about your middle school civics teacher or high school science teacher or the stress that a P.E. teacher faces in keeping a gym full of rambunctious students in line.
Now, picture any one of those teachers and imagine them peeking around a corner, gun drawn, looking to ambush and take out a heavily armed school shooter.
This is the fanciful scenario that gun-rights advocates would have us picture. This is the scenario Republicans are pushing instead of considering sensible gun-control measures to reduce the number of school shootings in the United States.
It is an absurd fantasy, one based upon a delusion that we all have an inner hero just waiting to come out and take control of a deadly situation. Whether or not conservative politicians truly believe this imaginative hallucination, it serves a political purpose; it is designed to distract from the need for real reform, the kind that Republicans have been obfuscating for years.
“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said. “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly.”
Paxton’s cowboy cosplay fantasy followed the murder of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in at an elementary school in his state. Rather than consider effective measures, he pandered to the whims of the National Rifle Association by suggesting that the presence of more guns can reduce gun violence.
But the fact is that the United States has by far the most civilian-owned guns among any developed nation. We also have the highest rate of gun deaths. We also are the only nation where mass shootings are a common occurrence.
Clearly, having more guns and embracing the “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun” mantra are not working. Good guys in the form of police waited outside rather than interrupt school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Fla.; it is farcical to suggest that a teacher would have more skill and courage in order to stop a mass shooting in progress.
The insanity of the armed-teacher proposal is exceeded only by a suggestion from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. “Have one door into and out of the school and have that one door, armed police officers at that door,” Cruz said in an interview on Fox News. “If that had happened . . . when that psychopath arrived, the armed police officers could have taken him out and we would have 19 children and two teachers still alive.”
In addition to demonstrating that he has never had a conversation with a fire marshal, Cruz ignored an important point: A murderous gunman who gets into a school – or a student who seizes a gun from an armed teacher – would have a shooting gallery of students bunched up at the only exit.
The idea of arming and training teachers has nothing to do with their jobs or the reason they got into teaching. It is an unserious suggestion aimed at turning the conversation, an attempt to cloud important discussions about the real problem: The prevalence of guns, particularly assault weapons that have no purpose other than the killing of human beings.
Until the nation can address that issue, we will be subjected to circular debates – and more school shootings.
Our middle school civics teacher would not approve.
