But the movement for hardening isn’t just impractical or lacking in evidentiary support; it’s also a dystopian stroke of authoritarianism that runs deeply counter to the ideas embodied in the Constitution. Increasingly militarized school resource officers don’t just passively wait for mass shootings; they have daily encounters with students that appear to be increasing in frequency. Brutality is endemic. Mother Jones chronicled 28 serious student injuries and one death from 2010 to 2015 in such encounters. The brunt of those brutal incidents and arrests falls on black students, and high-profile incidents of officers kicking students, choking them, handcuffing third-graders, and slamming students to the ground are all too common.

While most teachers are fiercely dedicated to their students, steady reports of abuse from some teachers, as well as reports of racial slurs and racial bias, should be strong reasons to be skeptical of arming teachers. Especially in the often-fraught environments of under-resourced classrooms, it’s probably not a good idea to have anybody with a gun present.

More broadly, hardening proposals posit that the only way to keep kids safe is to raise them in police states, kept under guard by killer drones, assault rifles, and armed teachers. As Coaston writes, these setups will almost certainly tend towards gross violations of students’ First Amendment rights to speech and Fourth Amendment rights to privacy, and will do so along already-established lines of race and class. As a person who attended a school where violence by resource officers was a fact of life for low-income black students, I can offer at least anecdotal support for this argument.

But hardening proposals also exhibit a circular logic that runs deeply counter to the spirit of the Second Amendment. Again, that provision implies a duty to resist tyranny, in all the forms of military, surveillance, and governmental overreach that helped spark the revolution. Suggestions to create a police state in American schools, however, mirror other pro-authoritarian tendencies that run counter to this instinct. In the creation of the carceral state, in the expansion of drug laws, and in the extreme militarization of police in recent years, people have argued that placing more guns in the hands of authorities is the only way to keep people safe. But why would pro-Second Amendment enthusiasts be in favor of providing more firepower to the government?

One legal theory used to oppose the preferences of many defenders of the Second Amendment is based on the fact that the militarized American police state has advanced far beyond the ability of any possible well-regulated militia to stop it. But lost in that observation is the fact that Americans—many of them staunch gun-rights advocates—have pushed repeatedly to bolster the military and the creep of militarism into other civic arenas. They’ve then trapped the country in an arms race between government and civilians, one in which civilians face severe losses from both state and private violence. And now students, protected in schools by the most basic tenets of the social contract, find themselves in the line of fire.