The National Rifle Association’s noxious dictum about guns – that the answer to too many gun deaths is more guns, always more guns, whether for soldiers, police officers, wilderness hikers, mall shoppers, moviegoers or schoolteachers – should be dead and discredited by now.

But like some pernicious cancer, it’s spreading. Gov. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota just signed a bill to allow teachers to carry guns in classrooms.

The teachers – or other school employees, security officers or volunteers – will be called “school sentinels.” They will receive firearms training and, in the delusional view of the law’s supporters, keep the peace when the shooters show up. The thinking is that South Dakota is a rural state where first responders can be many miles from an emergency scene, so it’s best to let amateurs handle things until the cops arrive.



“I think it does provide the same safety precautions that a citizen expects when a law enforcement officer enters onto a premises,” Mr. Daugaard said in The Times.

Feel reassured? I wouldn’t. Of course it’s easy to imagine a situation in which a heroic teacher with a gun takes a crazed gunman down, action-movie style, because we’ve seen that movie many times. But in the nonfictional world, where real schoolchildren live, it’s much easier to envision amateur shooters spraying bullets as wildly and ineffectively as, say, New York City police officers, and getting themselves and others killed.

We are not in Deadwood anymore, and who would want to be? The N.R.A.’s cherished Wild West, good-guy-gunman scenario discounts all the other, more plausible possibilities: of accidental firings, suicides, gun thefts and other lethal mayhem that regularly occurs when guns and people mix.

In this case, with little children nearby.