Of all the stupid and counter-productive ideas floated by Republicans in the wake of every school shooting, one of the dumbest is the push to arm teachers. It may be the logical extension of the “good guy with a gun” trope that the gun fondlers so love to throw out, but like it’s ideological parent it doesn’t actually make any sense if you stop to think about it for more than a half second. But far be it for the GOP dominated Legislature of Ohio to stop and think for that half second. Instead, they spent a lot of time to craft this awful piece of legislation to enable the arming of teachers with very little in the way of safeguards.
The news of this travesty was broken by the inimitable education blogger Mercedes Schneider, whose analysis on this (and everything related to education policy) is spot-on. The details of this bill, which Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has promised to sign, make it clear that the Legislature has no idea what introducing guns to the classroom would actually mean or what the definition of a “well-regulated militia” might entail when applied to educators.
First up, it seems that parental rights only go so far with the GOP when it comes to armed school personnel (unlike when it comes to diversity training or anything else that might challenge white supremacy.) Districts are required to inform the public if they choose to have armed educators, but there are no provisions to mandate informing parents of which teachers are armed or if guns are present in their child’s classroom.
Much more importantly, as Schneider points out, there is very little training required before a teacher is allowed to be armed on school property.
Initial instruction: 24 hours or less. Not even a full work-week’s worth of hours. Then, one full day of brush-up a year. ...
Less than 24 hours and the everyday teacher is ready to become an action-film hero.
But the classroom is no action film, and this bill leaves much unanswered.
Mind you, this is 24 hours or less of training to cover all these topics outlined in the bill:
(a) Mitigation techniques;
(b) Communications capabilities and coordination and collaboration techniques;
(c) Neutralization of potential threats and active shooters;
(d) Accountability;
(e) Reunification;
(f) Psychology of critical incidents;
(g) De-escalation techniques;
(h) Crisis intervention;
(i) Trauma and first aid care;
(j) The history and pattern of school shootings;
(k) Tactics of responding to critical incidents in schools;
(l) At least four hours of training in scenario-based or simulated training exercises;
(m) Completion of tactical live firearms training;
(n) Realistic urban training.
This bill also has no specific provisions for how firearms are to be secured or stored in the classroom. It lacks pretty much any provisions for basic gun safety or for informing parents of what gun safety measures might or might not be in place.
As a high school teacher myself, I look on this legislation as a positive danger to students. The very idea of introducing more guns into a school situation is terrifying. Not only do you have the problems at the high school level, where you have potentially volatile teenagers with as-yet-unmatured judgement or emotional maturity with ready access to a loaded gun, but you have all the problems of ill-trained people carrying and potentially using those guns in close proximity to students. Then you have the possibility of guns around even younger students, who may or may not be of an age to even understand the danger they represent. How often have we seen stories of young children shot by their peers because they got their hands on a gun and didn’t understand that it was dangerous? The very idea of putting a gun in a first grade classroom should have every parent involved running for the doors with their children. Yet this same Ohio bill makes no provision for parents who might not agree with the idea of having their children around an armed teacher. So we can see just how far that “parent’s rights” idea goes when it conflicts with the sacred cult of gun worship. It also leave aside a host of other questions that Schneider brings up:
Is the teacher carrying a concealed weapon as that teacher works in close contact with students? Is it locked in a safe in the classroom? Who has access? Are the exact teachers “packing heat” kept a secret from parents and students? What if those teachers are discovered and publicized on social media? Do they then become marks by those who see it as a challenge to confront a teacher carrying a gun? Does it become a dangerous game to some students to try to steal the teacher’s gun? Does videoing the teacher’s gun become a social media challenge?
How will districts pay for the liability insurance? What companies will insure the 24-hour-trained, gun-toting teachers in rooms full of children?
The questions just keep piling up, but they won’t be answered by this bill. The likelihood is that the answers will only be forthcoming when another child is dead and, this time, it is a teacher’s gun that has been used to make it happen. But don’t look to these legislators for answers, because they obviously haven’t bothered to think that far ahead.