There’s a meme going around Fb that skeptically concludes “… but now suddenly we can arm and train teachers to double as the last line of defense?”

This is disingenuous, not least because it assumes that we’re talking about arming teachers rather than allowing teachers to choose to be armed. There’s a huge difference between those ideas. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no serious proposals to force any schoolteachers to carry a gun.

The proposals are not to ‘arm’ teachers, but simply to give teachers a choice — the same choice that any adult person with a carry permit has in daily life.

Teachers with concealed carry permits are disarmed by law, but should they be? Or should their carry permits be recognized even while they are at work?

That’s literally the entire point of contention here, and the points made on both side of the discussion sound a lot like the arguments about concealed carry being allowed anywhere else.[ref]It’s weird. As state after state passed shall-issue concealed carry laws, politicians in most states were incredibly resistant to looking at the experience of other states. The argument kept centering around theoretical “blood in the streets!” and “shootouts over parking spaces!” even when there were plenty of other states that already had passed such laws and had no such problems. On this issue, there are states and jurisdictions where teacher’s carry permits are already recognized and where teachers can indeed carry at work. Utah has allowed teachers to carry at school for many years, and … how’s that working for them? What do their mass-murder stats look like? How many children have wrestled guns away from their teachers and gone on a rampage? How many kindergartners have snatched their teachers’ guns? Why isn’t anyone talking about this?[/ref]

Furthermore…

Newflash: teachers are already the last line of defense.

They always have been.

The person hiding in the closet with a classroom full of terrified kindergartners should have something effective they can do when the monster flings open that door.

Even the most loving human body makes a very ineffective ballistic shield.

This does not turn the teacher into a cop or security guard. It turns the teacher into a modern, tool-using human being solving a terrible problem in the only way that’s left after all other efforts have failed. It gives the teacher a choice where currently they have none.

The argument isn’t about whether or not teachers should try to protect  their students. Good people already do that. But too often, they fail.

So the argument truly isn’t about whether teachers should get an ‘extra’ burden that they’re not already carrying. And it isn’t about forcing everyone to solve the problem in the same way.

It is only about whether those teachers who would prefer to use effective tools — for a job they’re going to try to do in any case — should be allowed to have them.