Arming teachers would protect students in active shooter situations

By ALEXIS ERB

Staff Writer

Teachers are usually concerned with wanting students to shoot for straight As, but now they are worried about whether they should be carrying a weapon to protect students. According to Debate.org, 56 percent of people believe that teachers should be armed and an underwhelming 44 percent say that teachers shouldn’t.

However, teachers, the very people being discussed, have their own opinions about this polarizing topic. A study held by the News & Observer asked teachers in North Carolina how they felt about guns at school. A jaw dropping 78 percent of North Carolina teachers were against having weapons that could save peoples lives in tragedy such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This startling fact raises a question: What is considered a priority of safety for the children these teachers look after every single day? If teachers don’t feel they should be armed then should there be more resource officers on a given campus to protect the defenseless students

A Los Angeles Times writer named Paul Thornton, said “putting guns into classrooms would only create more problems than it might solve”. According to the article it was also stated that “ the article was swift and almost completely one-sided”. The writer for the Los Angeles Times therefore didn’t represent the side of the people who want teachers to be armed which is a social injustice to the public to disregard the other side of a important controversial debate.

Many teachers and school officials think that instead of arming teachers, there should be more school resource officers and/or police officers. Based off the poll held by the News & Observer, this would be the best bet for the security of the students. However, the most recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had a armed resource officer right outside the entrance of the school.

The officer failed to go into the high school and take down the gunman that killed 17 students. Because of the officers selfish acts, 17 families are without their children they will never see again. They will will never see their children  graduate high school or college or get married. So for any school official or teacher that would rather take chances on a resource officer that may act in a time of need or cower in a corner, remember those families that have lost a child.There are benefits to having resource officers in schools, but if they don’t do their designated job, then who will? If teachers don’t want to assume the responsibility and some resource officers won’t do their job then who will protect our children from threats at school?

The best chance the children in our schools have right now is our teachers. Some people oppose the idea because of fear of a teacher accidentally shooting a student or a student getting ahold of a teacher’s sidearm. What people don’t realize though, is that this happens to trained police officers on occasion. If teachers were armed, they would be trained and would be in the exact same predicament as a normal police officer would, and a trained teacher would know to leave their firearm on their person at all times and never take it off. This prevents a student from getting ahold of the firearm and it is also at the teacher’s waist for convenience in case of an emergency.