Steve Frey
Some of our leaders want to arm our teachers. They want your child’s elementary school teacher to be able to shoot and kill a mass murderer.
What has happened to our country? What kind of society have we become when we feel we need to ask our teachers to arm themselves in order to kill madmen where they teach?
Teachers did not study how to shoot people in college; not just shoot people, but shoot to kill, because that is the only way to stop someone with a semi-automatic rifle.
Imagine this scenario: Bam! Bam! Bam! The kindergarten teacher, Ms. Smith, hears the loud shots echoing in the hall. She hears screaming as children run and doors slam. Bam! Bam! Bam!
More shots ricochet through the halls. Bam! Bam! Bam! That’s 9 shots in less than 15 seconds. Miss Smith is acting on instinct. She has quickly closed her door, gathered her crying children out of sight, and turned off the lights.
She now has a choice: should she grab the school-district issued handgun and ammo in her locked desk and go out or stay sheltered in her room, guarding her children?
She volunteered to have the gun, but now, when she looks at her children, she wonders what is best. Bam! Bam! Bam! More shots. She decides she is going to try to stop the shooter.
The children are crying loudly, uncontrollably. They are scared to death; she is scared to death. Bam! Bam! Bam! Yes, she’ll go after the shooter who has a semi-automatic rifle, the weapon of choice for mass murderers.
She tells the children to stay in the corner and that she will be right back. She opens the door, rushes out firing, and … BAM! BAM! BAM!
Is this what we expect our teachers to do now? Is that what they signed-up for in their education classes about assessment, reading, or social studies in the elementary school?
All through college, they were taught to create caring, nurturing environments filled with kindness and compassion. Now they are being asked to face a deranged murderer who has a semi-automatic weapon, perhaps a deranged young adult they once taught, who, by the way, is probably wearing body armor for protection; they are not.
The AR-15 they are facing can fire rapidly with a magazine of 30 rounds, which means the shooter doesn’t have to reload often.
Here’s a description of what an AR-15 bullet does to the body from Heather Sher, a radiologist who worked with the Parkland, Florida wounded:
“One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.”
This is the firepower our Miss Smith could be facing. The AR-15 is a weapon designed for combat. If a round goes through a person’s body, the exit wound is the size of an orange. It is a killing machine designed to create maximum devastation on the battlefield.
Why is it that the first solution some leaders suggest for solving the problem with guns in schools is to add more guns in schools?
Has our society devolved to the point where schools, caring places dedicated to helping young children happily learn, grow, and succeed in society will now become armed camps with a wild-west mentality?
Will nurses now carry sidearms in hospitals? Will ministers carry a gun under their vestments? Will grocery clerks carry guns as they load shelves?
The postman, the Wal-Mart cashier, the recreation department desk personnel, the movie cleaning staff—will everyone need to have a gun to shoot down a crazy person, since it could happen anywhere?
Is this the kind of society we want? Are we reacting to a problem in a way that will prevent it?
Many of the same people who want to give Miss Smith a handgun may be part of the reason the problem exists. They are legislators who refuse to raise taxes or adjust priorities to meet the changing needs of the country.
They starve the budgets of schools, community health services and even law enforcement agencies and then complain that the agencies are doing a poor job. You can only do more with less for so long, and then you just have less.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250:1. In Virginia, the ratio recently was 381:1. Can a counselor with a caseload of 381 or more students today really know them well, intervene in their problems, and prevent or aid adequately in crises?
What’s worse is that there are almost 850,000 high school students in the U.S. who, according to federal data, have no access to a counselor at all.
We are running our school, social services, police, and community mental health professionals ragged so that we don’t have to spend money to adequately support them.
There are meth and opiate addictions, below-poverty-level households, criminals, domestic abuse issues, high school dropouts with a lack of employable skills, mental illness, PTSD, child abuse, and many other societal problems, but there aren’t enough counselors, social workers, school psychologists, school resource officers, community health organizations, women’s health services, police patrolmen, and the list goes on, because they aren’t funded by the government.
The president’s budget recommendation that came out before the shooting in Parkland cut millions of dollars from mental health services.
One of the first acts of the administration was to allow people with mental issues to have more access to guns. Does this seem logical?
Of course, Florida has been starving their public schools for years but was able to hypocritically come up with 400 million dollars in a matter of days for gun safety/mental health programs when they felt forced to do so.
However, the chance they actually follow through is probably much less than 50-50.
So let’s do what we always do: ask our overburdened teachers to do more. We expect them to be teachers, counselors, mandated reporters, nurses, social workers, mothers or fathers to children who don’t have them and meet all of the diverse special needs of students in their classrooms (with student-teacher ratios that are astronomical) without adequate support.
We don’t pay them enough to even keep up with the cost of living and, in some districts, they may be constantly losing ground because of the cost of health insurance rising.
Yet they spend their own money to provide a snack to a hungry child, provide pencils and supplies to children who don’t have them, and purchase materials to make their classrooms more inviting for their children.
But hey, some legislators want to take away that $250.00 tax deduction from them, too.
Now we want to give them a gun and ask them to go out and kill a maniac in the hallway.
Perhaps a better idea would be to work on the problems causing the terrorism in our country.
Yes, the majority of the terrorism in the U.S. is not caused by immigrants or foreigners; it is caused by angry, white, domestic terrorists who are almost all male and possess combat ready, military-style weapons designed to kill as many people as possible, as fast as possible.
Perhaps a better idea would be to hire more counselors, school psychologists, school resource officers, officials to administer universal background checks effectively, social workers, community health services, and other professionals to man programs to fight the problems at their roots.
Perhaps we could “harden” school infrastructure and provide other safety systems while we’re at it.
Would you give back your tax cut to save some children at your neighborhood school? Should we be cutting taxes on corporations and the extremely wealthy instead of funding programs that may save children’s lives?
Perhaps we should consider other potential problems with more guns in schools: students grabbing them from adults; children getting into a drawer, finding a gun, and shooting a peer; unbalanced adults using a gun as in Dalton, Georgia; guns accidentally going off in a classroom; police mistaking teachers with guns as assailants; and more.
Perhaps we should be demanding that our legislators make a commitment, monetarily, morally, and concretely to put in place common-sense gun safety measures to take military-style weapons out of the hands of domestic terrorists, those angry white male potential killers who are roaming our streets, malls, and schoolyards. (See “Our National Nightmare,” in the Feb. 21 Radford News Journal for more gun safety discussion.)
Perhaps we should stop making the United States one giant war zone where everyone needs a gun as an equalizer and focus on ways to return to a more civilized society, as other first world nations have demonstrated is possible.
Perhaps we should allow our teachers to focus on what they love, what they care about most, and what they do best—teach—and leave the killing of murderers to armed resource officers placed in every school “to serve and protect.”
Perhaps we should do these things instead of asking Miss Smith to leave her children, go out in that hall, face that withering gunfire, and shoot to kill some insane murderer because our legislators (and us, too, if we continue to vote for them.), don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do the things we need to do to safeguard our schools and society.
Steve Frey is a writer and CEO of Ascendant Educational Services, based in Radford.
