I've been following this discussion for a few days and keeping to myself, but I think now is a good time to pass along my two cents. It isn't going to be what you assume. And since the topic is teachers having guns in school, and by association the implication of school shootings, I will save the 2nd Amendment talk to the Guns thread, where it belongs. Changing the debate to gun control is just a distracting tangent in this thread, and has its own thread.
Both sides of this debate need to shut up. Not GTP specifically, but everyone. The idea of armed teachers is a knee-jerk reaction, just like suddenly screaming for gun control is. The scariest thing that has come from all this isn't that a guy with a gun walked into a school and opened fire, but that we have been promised rushed legislation. You see, the killing is the wound. Wounds heal. Our reaction is the scar that will be there forever. Nothing that lasting should be hurried while emotions are high.
You see, I handle stressful situations different than everyone I know. I have my initial emotion-fueled reaction, and in that mindset I may think of a million things to do, but I have trained myself not to act on those thoughts. I switch my focus to dealing with the situation and calming down. Once I am calm, then I determine what response is needed, or if one is needed at all. I have found nothing gets solved when emotions are in control. I aim to be focused within 15 minutes of shocking news. I've received calls from executives panicked over a problem I've already solved and when someone dies I am the first to dry my tears and discuss arrangements. I come off as uncaring, but I rarely find myself wondering what I was thinking because I made a bad situation worse.
Lets look at some statistics.
According to the
US Department of Education in 2010 there were 132,183 schools in the US. Of those, 98,817 were public, 33,366 were private.
The number of school shootings in the US is likely less than 50. I can't find concrete, official numbers because everyone starts counting from different dates. Most don't start counting before Columbine in 1999 (30-something). I dont like it because that wasnt the first shooting, but it was the first big one after the 24-hour news cycle began and we couldn't not hear about every instance from that point on. But, for the sake of argument, and simple math, I will round all the way up to saying 100. That is .07%.
Thing is, that is a meaningless number. It takes the value of schools in one year and is dividing it by all school shootings in the US, ever (with an inflated number too). The real odds of a specific school having a shooting is the percentage of schools in the above number struck in one year, then averaged for every year. Start adding zeros after the decimal place. We are talking tiny fractions of one percent.
What are the odds of your child being in a school where a shooting occurs? For simplicity we would divide the number of shootings in 13 years (K-12) by the total number of schools in that time period. That goes back to 1999, the year of the Columbine shooting. Now that 30-something number matters. But it is still incomprehensibly small.
So should teachers be armed? Not if you are trying to protect them from a major threat that can happen just around the corner. But the same can be said about using school shootings as an excuse to implement new gun control. In fact,
they are far more likely to die in your car on the way to school, and odds are you would be at least partly to blame. And that is with laws requiring that seat belts and car seats be properly used.
Now, I know that "if even one life is saved it is worth it," but how do you guarantee that? In the auto accident example over half the cases studied had children improperly (and thus illegally) secured. A lot of those are not willful violations of law. The parents thought they did it right. We can't agree on what the right course of action should be, much less how that course of action should be implemented.
And that is where knee-jerk, emotion-fueled reactions are dangerous. To truly maximize the effect of any action taken we need more information. We need to study these cases for the signs of a person heading down this path, figure out why private schools are unaffected (changes our percentages a bit), why nearly all cases involve males, and what other correlating factors there are. We would also need to incorporate other forms of school violence to find out if/how many are the result of instability but without access to a gun. In short, we don't know the motivations behind these, how their ability to attack in a specific way (such as with guns) affects their decisions, or any other unknown variables.
And that is the big issue. I tried finding information on public vs private school shootings and I ran across
an article discussing it, which had one standout statement :
In the past 45 years, of the dozens of school shootings across the country, almost all of them have taken place at a public institution.
People who study school shootings seem to agree that there isn't a large enough sample of cases -- thankfully, they add -- to say with certainty that most of the incidents happen at public schools and, if true, why.
"I'm skeptical if that's a valid enough conclusion," said Eric Dubow, a psychology professor at Bowling Green State University. "Thank God there are not that many school shootings. It's not a large enough sample size to make that claim yet."
Thankfully, not a large enough sample size. In short, we don't know what we are fixing or if what we propose will work. All anyone really knows is that they want something done, and they want it now. Not because it will definitely fix something, but because it will make us feel better.
Ultimately, the question of armed teachers (or armed security) should come down to the parents and teachers in each school. A case by case basis is the only way to deal with this because it is feel good action and until we know more we have no choice but to handle each shooting on a case by case basis.
Perhaps this statistical, logic-based look at this makes me appear uncaring. But I understand the emotions, the want to fix it. I have a daughter. I occasionally find some scenes in movies or TV hard to watch because I think about how I would react or feel. I did the same thing every parent did when they first heard about Newtown, I felt the pain of the parents who lost their child. But I knew I wasn't thinking clearly in that state.
The worst tragedy of all this is how pundits on all sides are trying to use our emotional state to push political agendas.
