I just got home from the rec center because my daughter and I recently started an exercise program. While riding the bike in the weight room I found myself listening to the Ed Schultz show on the television. His guest was an elementary school teacher in Utah who wants to get a concealed gun permit so she can carry a gun in her classroom.
This teacher said that she had a big emotional reaction to the Newtown shooting and wanted "options" for what she could do as a teacher to protect her students. She then said that didn't want armed guards in schools, but felt that concealed gun permits were the best option. According to this teacher, for the past 12 years Utah state law has allowed teachers to carry guns in Utah schools.
The teacher being interviewed by Ed Schultz used typical Republican terminology to refer to people who use guns to kill others. She said the shooters are the "bad guys." This of course means that she is implying that teachers are "the good guys." But this isn't always true, and things that happen at school are not always so clearly defined as this teacher seems to think.
What about all of the teachers who have sexually assaulted students over the years?
What about if an elementary school student brings a knife to school?
I can think of many concerns I have about teachers carrying guns. In one school I taught in, there was a teacher who was a little odd (my opinion). One day, the students came into my class telling me that this teacher had just become so mad at them she slammed the classroom door on them. The students said she slammed the classroom door so hard that the door's handle fell off. Days later, the students came in telling me that they had found a "huge 6 inch hunting knife" in her closet. The students said that she had told them the knife "was for cutting watermelon." Neither the students nor I were convinced that she needed a knife like that to cut watermelon and neither did the principal once she found out. The teacher was gone that day, never to be seen again in that school.
In another school, we used to have a problem with high school students circling in cars. They would do this just as school was letting out and the middle school kids were getting onto the bus. Occasionally we teachers on bus duty would see one of the high school student brandishing a gun as they drove by. Teachers are not trained in how to handle this type of violence. Teachers are trained in teaching and this is how it should stay. Asking teachers to carry guns in school is asking our society to mask a very serious problem.
It does not surprise me that we are asking schools to treat our very serious gun violence with band aids.
This is what we have been doing for years in the inner city, where gun violence has been wreaking havoc with our youth for decades.
I saw guns at almost every school I taught at. First there were the gang bangers, who would drive around at lunch time, brandishing their guns from their cars. Then there were the repeated fire drills one year. Dutifully the school would file outside and we would watch as the gang bangers drove around looking for some particular kid. The school district took care of that particular problem by changing the alarms--no longer could anybody simply pull the alarm. This stopped the fire drills but it didn't stop the violence.
Another time, there was a group of ROTC students standing in the hallway outside my classroom. They were banging their wooden rifles (fake) up and down in the hallway, making a great deal of noise. I stepped into the hallway to ask them to move away from the classroom and one of the students came at me with one of the rifles.
In this same school there was an attempted murder one day. One student, (she happened to be one of my students) beat up another student at lunch time. Reports from people in the lunch room that day said that my student threw the other student to the ground. She then held the girl's head and bashed it over and over into the ground. The girl who was beaten up ended up in a coma. I'm not sure that she ever returned to school.
Inner city violence has historically been dealt with by dress codes. Back in the early 90s (and maybe earlier) schools began issuing edicts which stated what a student could and could not wear. Sagging pants, head gear, including hats and bandanas and certain colors were prohibited as were all professional sports wear. The use of dress policies did not solve the problem of inner city violence--it simply drove it outside the school walls.
Now we are watching the white, middle class community as they are forced to look at our problem with violence. The mass shootings we have seen are committed largely by white people against mostly white people. But instead of dealing with the issue, we are once again wanting to keep it at bay. This policy is short sighted and will only lead to more violence.
Gun violence is destroying us.
Gun violence has been taking the lives of huge numbers of Black and Hispanic young men for years and now it is taking the lives of of little school children.
We should have been doing something when it was our inner city youth who were being killed--but now that the violence has spread, we must take action. We must get rid of guns. We don't need them.
We don't need to kill other human beings.
It really is that simple.
