Should we Arm Teachers?

Among everything else going on in the gun world these days, another hot topic is arming teachers. Trump suggested it right after the Parkland shooting, and it began a very heated debate among the people. To date, I haven't touched on it much, but I want to go ahead and do that. 

You might be surprised to hear I don't support the suggestions put forth for arming teachers. Why? Because I believe it would a lot easier and much more stream lined if we just removed the laws that prevent them from doing so in the first place. 

You have to remember, with the leftists and gun grabbers, they have an all or none mentality. They aren't hearing what arming teachers actually means. They keep going on and on about how they don't want to carry a gun and they don't want teachers to be armed... the thing is, the suggestions put forth have never suggested forcing any teacher to carry a gun. It's voluntary, and only those who want to can. Meaning if you don't want to be armed you don't have to be. 

And leftists gun grabbers are using the same arguments here that they used against concealed carry in general, the same ideas that never panned out. "THERE WILL BE BLOOD IN THE STREETS!" Of course everyone was going to shoot everyone else and the murder rate was going to skyrocket and we'd be hearing gunfire all the time, taking cover for 3/4 of our day as the public shot at each other over line cutting disputes and hatred for someone's shoes. That never happened; concealed carriers still remain one of the most law abiding groups of people in the country. But now we're saying teachers will be shooting the kids for acting out in class and the students will steal their guns and all this other stuff. The schools will be war zones! Blood pouring from the lockers! Yeah, right. 

But I think a lot of that could be overlooked by just doing away with the law preventing them instead of creating another law or loophole to allow them to. Maybe concealed carry only for the buildings or something. The government should not be paying for their training. The government should not be paying for their guns. By removing the laws, we take government out of it completely. OK, now you can carry if you have a concealed carry license and are complying with state and Federal laws. You are required to go through the same training as any other concealed carrier, and the cost burden is yours, like everyone else. Your gun is your choice and the cost burden is yours. If you don't want to carry, don't. 

However, I also support school guards. There are plenty of veterans who are out of work right now who would love a job protecting kids. They are fully trained with their weapons, they have procedure down pat, and they have training far and above anything you could ask a teacher to go through. You'd be giving these men and women a full time job that they would enjoy, and you would be getting extra out of the military training they received. I would put one at every door leading outside from a hallway or office cluster, and two roaming hallways per building. Uniform: polo shit and khakis in the school colors. 

Schools should be carrying out basic safety procedures. I recently started delivering food for an app service part time, and I deliver to several schools. And I'm noticing things. One school is locked down like Fort Knox. You aren't getting in there unless someone physically lets you in. And the people are placed away from the doors in such an way that if a nutter tried shooting through the doors, if a bullet went through, the office personnel would not be hit. Another school, however, has entrances in various areas - as well as stand alone trailer classrooms - that lead directly to classrooms. The doors are glass. There is no one in the hallways. I don't know if they are locked during school hours, and I don't know the rating on the glass, if it even has one. Each classroom has a door leading outside - also glass. Those are not locked, because I've driven by and seen them propped open during the day. This should not be. Those doors are there for quick exit during a fire, but I think they are a terrible idea. If they are there, they should be solid metal doors that remain locked at all times, and should have a fire alarm that sounds if opened. This shouldn't be a problem, considering other classrooms have bookcases in front of them anyway. So what's the use? 

I've been in a school that was evacuated due to fire (we had a stage in our gym, and the lighting system fell and caught the stage on fire). The school wasn't all ground level like these; it was four floors high with twisting hallways, long staircases, no elevators, and lots of other obstacles. We all got out fine. That's what fire drills are for. 

A big portion of the argument against doing anything safety wise in the schools is the fact that people don't want schools to be prisons. But the fact is, a lot of schools have metal detectors and police roaming the hallways. When I was high school age, our local public high school was that way. And that was in the early and mid 90s. Now, that was a rough school (note: total number of mass shootings: 0. Total number of shootings of any kind: 0). So I'm not saying every school should be like this. But doing basic things to defend students should be a no brainer. And having armed veterans is not, in fact, a bad idea. Odds are, after the first week, the kids would forget they were even there. 

And here's where honesty comes in. A lot of the problems in the schools are your little special snowflakes. We have resource officers in the schools because your little tykes can act like real buttholes sometimes. And at the end of the day, your precious little ones are spending their day cutting each other down to build themselves up. We keep hearing about what everyone else has to do. How about what you, as parents, are going to do? What are you going to do, tonight, to teach your child to not be a little piece of trash? And no, I don't want to hear about how your kid would never do anything like that. What you think and what is reality is irrelevant. You don't know what your kid is doing at school. So maybe we can work towards raising kids who learn to respect others, to respect human life, and to not treat each other like garbage so they can be "cool." Stop expecting everyone else to raise your kids, and start taking them in hand yourself. Teach them values and morals. And when you hear your kid did something to another student, discipline them. Stop chastising other parents for raising their voices to their kids or doing something to discipline them. Kids don't raise themselves. You have to raise them. They aren't an accessory, a quick way to a pay raise at work, or something you have because you are expected to. If you can't bring yourself to raise your child to be a decent human being, don't have a child. But if you do have a child, raise them. 

To the kids themselves... stop spending your time telling everyone else what they have to do to make your school safer. Take a minute away from preening in the bathroom mirror or trying to be the most popular kid in school, and realize that matters not one bit in life. Talk to the kid no one else is talking to. You don't have to become best friends with them, but say hi when you pass them in the hallway. Maybe once in a while do something like tell them you forgot to write down the homework assignment for the night and ask if they have it so you can see what you need to do for homework. Nothing too serious. Just enough that the kid doesn't feel invisible. And if you don't like someone, that's fine. Ignore them instead of torturing them. If you want your 15 minutes of fame, you have a great shot at getting it by doing something good for someone or by doing something others can't do then you do by torturing someone for an online video. And since that stuff will haunt you for the rest of your life online anyway - especially if you got your 15 minutes of fame from it - it will do you better trying to get into colleges or trying to get jobs if your 15 minutes came from something amazing instead of something showcasing your torture abilities. No college and no hiring company wants a butthole around. 

Now I know, no one wants blame bullying or any of that stuff for these shootings. And that's fine, you can live in a dream land where these things happen out of thin air and everyone just randomly snaps for no reason. But the fact of the matter is that a simple hi once in a while can snap someone out of their own dreamland of mass killing. It gives them some fleeting hope that maybe someone actually sees them and they aren't as worthless as they think they are. Yeah, I believe these shooters have mental issues. That's sort of obvious. But people who are unstable can be set off. You can, in fact, make a big difference with people like that by doing simple things. 

Anyway, these are just some ways to make schools safer. The most important ways being veterans protecting our kids and removing laws that keep teachers defenseless. If teachers want to be armed, they should able to do so, on their own dime. If they don't want to to be armed, that, too, should be their choice. And it is high time schools get their acts together and start being serious about school security. That's actual school safety. And it doesn't violate anyone's constitutional rights. 

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