Societal problem?

Use teachers to handle it.

Why address the actual problem, its underlying causes, and find ways to reduce it, when you can pass the responsibility on to someone else and then critique if they are doing it right.

Besides teaching, being surrogate parents, counselors, and disciplinarians, now we can have teachers armed and they can take on the job of armed security guards.

Practical considerations, and these were brought up where I once taught, and the responses eventually became silence:

Teachers stand in the hall when classes are changing to make sure movement is orderly and to deal with any altercations that are caused by friction in the building and even conflicts carried into the school from the streets of the neighborhoods.

Teachers can be accidentally or even purposefully jostled as they supervise.

Nothing would stop a student intent on doing so from pretending that a jostle was a harmless accident when it is really a planned move to get the teacher’s gun. There is also no way to avoid any one student or group from overpowering the teacher who is not looking at them, distracted by an activity that is spontaneous or a planned distraction.

The response to that concern was to have the gun locked in a teacher’s desk, which would prolong the response time to get to the gun if the teacher was not near the desk, and the time to unlock the desk drawer to get the gun.

Even with the gun locked in a desk drawer it is not guaranteed safety as any student motivated to do so would find a way to get the drawer opened.

It happens. Teachers have lost purses that way.

As is coming out in the Florida case, and has been seen in earlier ones, a gun attack can be carefully planned as to the most effective way to reek havoc and have an escape. Students would learn very quickly which teachers have the guns, making them the first targets.

Then, of course, the concern would be the liability of a teacher who is armed but not in a position to act, or does act, but in the confusion mistakenly shoots the wrong student.
ESPN.com RaceCast, ESPN.com’s enhanced, live race-day applications features a live animated brand viagra 100mg graphic display, track information, lap leaders, race leaders, driver information and live in-race chat with ESPN announcers and reporters. Infrequent mixing of couple Over anxiety and depression state of mind Bad habits of artificial way of ejaculation in teen age groups One of the best hospital in India and have conducted many successful cipla generic viagra operations of spinal deformity. Anybody can be cheap cialis pills captured by this disorder and are not able to enjoy their sex life & its benefits. It also does another important viagra tablet that is very necessary for the continuation of intimacy.
They would also be judged how they reacted to seeing another person wielding a gun who may be the shooter or another person on the campus who is armed.

First responders would  encounter an adult in the building wielding a gun most likely not knowing it is a teacher, and if the person does not stop he or she could end up being shot. Even if not, as the responders think they have the shooter, only to find out they don’t,  the time that could have been used apprehending the perpetrator was wasted on the teacher while more students die or the shooter gets out while the responders were busy identifying the teacher.

Meanwhile, as teachers are responsible for bringing the shooter under control, they are still responsible for the students, doing what is proper for their own safety, getting students to a safe location, and assisting in the orderly evacuation. This whole process is orderly in the imagination, but chaos in reality.

Another concern follows the Leave No Child Behind model.

While ignoring the teachers in the classroom who could have told people what the real problems were and what the solutions could be, politicians claimed to know what was wrong with education and proposed solutions based on that so, rather than solve the real problems, they demanded solutions for the fictitious ones and in so doing made the system worse.

School district administrators had no idea what to do, and they turned to the experts who spontaneously sprang up claiming they knew the way.

School districts spent hundreds of thousands dollars each for experts to come in and introduce methods that would make things work, as they ignored teachers in their own districts who were successful and could have shared their methods with others.

I know of one teacher who was chosen the state teacher of the year for her method for teaching math. She spent the year after the award traveling the state teaching her method to other math teachers. The following year her school district hired a consulting firm for a few hundred thousand dollars to teach its self-designed better math methodology, and then rated that teacher as being poor as she did not have the same degree of student achievement with their method as she had had with her own.

But the consulting firms were a straw to grasp at, and school boards found ways to justify the expense.

If the idea to arm all teachers gets heavy promotion it is important to ascertain who is doing the promoting.

The plan will call for training and guns. Certainly teachers will not be required to cover the cost of training and guns, so school districts will need to spend money from their budgets on that. Long range solutions will be put aside for the quick fix, and like the consulting firms used to solve non-existent problems with verifiable failing solutions when it came to instruction, gun manufacturers and gun expert consulting firms will have found a cash cow, and will use the scare tactic of child safety to fleece school districts.

Rather than panic and spend money where it need not be spent, real national solutions need to be instituted, but that calls for work and politicians turning on their big money donors.

Let teachers teach, and have the country’s leadership find ways to solve the gun problem so they can do their job of teaching students.