Arm educators now to protect students
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In seven days, there were four school shootings at United States educational facilities. Within days of Stephen Kazmierczak shooting and killing five Northern Illinois University students and himself, there were three other school shootings in this country.
It’s time to arm teachers with more than book knowledge.
According to USA Today, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge on Feb. 8. In Memphis, a 17-year-old was accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Feb. 11 during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school was declared brain dead.
So now, once again, investigators are looking for answers to the unanswerable, and the public is looking for someone to blame.
In this last instance, however, there were no brooding hate poems left conspicuously on his laptop or death threats mailed to the administration. At least as far as we know.
What we do know is that criminals or those intent on committing a crime don’t allow something as inconvenient as a law to stand in their way. So for the anti-gun lobbyists who want to disarm the citizens in hopes of creating a safer America, here’s the truth: You would only be disarming those who follow laws. Who does that leave out? One hundred percent of the criminals.
It’s time to arm teachers and administrators with something more substantial to stand behind than an overturned desk and a line of uniforms who appear after the crime is committed and it is too late for the victims.
Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson proposed a bill in January that would allow any school employee to carry a gun as long as that person had a permit. State law already allows people to carry concealed with a permit, but not into schools.
Johnson’s bill could change that.
With training, teachers, janitors, principals and cafeteria workers could be prepared to defend whole rooms of otherwise defenseless children.
Is this scary? Yes.
But has it become a necessity? You tell me after you finish reading — once again — about students running for their lives in the very places they should be the safest.
It would also necessitate a different kind of training for police officers, who are accustomed to only the bad guys having guns.
