Once again, we’ve had another school shooting, and the usual cries for giving school teachers guns to deal with active shooter incidents are circulating from the far-right.

These are individuals that want you to believe that teachers are lazy, liberal propaganda machines. Yet, when the talk of reforming our laws to keep criminals and the violently mentally ill from getting their hands on guns, the tired old proposal of arming educators pops up once more.

My father was an English teacher, just to provide you an anecdote. Half the time, he couldn’t remember where his glasses where, even though they were on the top of his head. For a period of time, he worked at a maximum security federal prison as a psychologist. He was expected to undergo weapons training, and the targets he brought home were about as accurate as a rejected Stormtrooper extra in Star Wars.

When I was a kid, my dad carried my rifle for me, once. That was the time he nearly put a .22 round in his foot, and we decided he needed to stick with education, not firearms. His aunt was a friend of Albert Einstein back in the day and she had to make sure he was wearing matching socks when going out in public.







I own and use weapons. I hunt, sometimes I conceal carry, and I target practice whenever I can.

Unlike my father, I’m not an intellectual pacifist who couldn’t hurt a fly. But I have no fantasies that my children’s social studies teacher, or myself, could successfully fight back against a deranged, suicidal person with an assault rifle intent on killing as many innocent children as they can before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Simply put, based off my personal experiences, the vast majority of educators have enough issues dealing with budget cuts, tests, and performance reports. Asking them to serve as armed security guards isn’t just idiotic, it’s a slap in their faces.

Ask teachers if they want to have guns to protect their classrooms from the next school shooter. I’m sure that there are some that willing and able, but I’ll bet you most want comprehensive background checks, or even an assault weapons ban.

You wouldn’t ask educators to be The Punisher or Rambo. That’s not what they’re trained to be. If we don’t have money to send kids to college, we certainly don’t have the funds to give every teacher an AR-15.

More guns is not the answer. We aren’t able to confiscate every semi-auto, high-capacity weapon in the United States, nor should we. However, we can enact commonsense controls on who is allowed to purchase and own them going forward, and take these weapons out of the hands of people who pose a threat to their communities. That’s what responsible gun ownership is all about.

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