Guns in schools recipe for trouble

TUCUMCARI — To make schools safer, we should consider locking doors, installing security cameras, tightening procedures and protocols, planning and drilling for active shooters, and maybe even hiring armed security guards.

Please, do not arm teachers.

Having taught for a year at Tucumcari High School and a year at the Guadalupe County Correctional facility, I am speaking from experience — only a year of it, but from experience.

Teachers have a hard enough time maintaining working relationships with students without students knowing the teacher has a firearm.

Teachers with guns would further complicate the balance of friendliness and authority.

Arming teachers would make them the equivalent of police to many students. Many students regard police with suspicion, and suspicion does not enhance learning.

Further, the teacher would bear the new burden of knowing that he or she would be expected to gun down an active shooter, if it became necessary.

This is not the job teachers are trained for.

Military personnel and police tend to be inclined toward physical defense and protection and spend their lives training for confrontation and combat.

Not teachers. Teachers are inclined toward service through education and should be trained in defusing tensions and demonstrating to students that their chief jobs are to teach and help students learn.

Teachers should not be required to be security guards.

In fact, having an army of teachers exchanging fire with an active shooter is likely to be more dangerous than protecting students in other ways. Better to train teachers in how to get the kids to safety, as many are.

Further, the teacher’s gun would become a prime target of kids seeking to make names for themselves through acts of toughness and defiance.

I’m not saying teachers are careless. They aren’t.

But a momentary lapse and a very aware student are going to coincide somewhere and suddenly a school will become needlessly dangerous again.

Another inevitability: A teacher somewhere is going to get fed up, lose control in the face of an unruly class, and pull the gun.

I am not in favor of gun control. I think gun control ignores our nation’s too-common cultural and behavioral dysfunctions that lead too many people to glorify violence.

The call to arm teachers seems to originate from the National Rifle Association’s romanticizing of both gun ownership and the need to blow away bad guys into some kind of heroic cause.

I agree with their goal of maintaining the right to keep and bear arms but not their tactics.

In the right hands, which means a vast majority of us, guns are tools for hunting, target shooting and yes, self-defense, especially in rural areas where police protections are limited.

They should no longer be the stuff of legend or a proof of manhood. The Wild West ended early in the 20th century.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

stevenmhansen

@plateautel.net