School Shootings

Should Educators Carry Guns or Not?

According to a list of school shootings on the CNN web-site, there were twenty school shootings that happened in the United States between January 2018 and April 2018. Twenty shootings, which killed and injured many people, on campuses are not a small number. Shockingly, a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida killed seventeen innocent people on February 14th, 2018, and it is a serious alert to students’ safety on campus. Many people believe that educators should be armed, so the students would feel safe while being in schools. Some people also urge the American government to enact a law, which allows educators to possess weapons in schools. On the other hand, there have been

If teachers have guns, they would be first responders in an emergency situation, while it takes a while, such as “five minutes, ten minutes or [even] longer, [for the police to] respond to [an incident]” (Santoni 2018). Teachers want to have more choices to prevent students from danger in school shooting situations. To be more specific, as a teacher, Kasey Hansen, who is teaching in Utah, wants to ensure the safety of her students, so she is willing to “stand in front of a bullet for any student” (Murphy 2014). To her, this is the best solution to protect students, but she also wants “another option to defend [both students and herself]” (Murphy 2014). Therefore, she is one of many people across America, who encourages teachers to carry handguns in schools after terrible school shootings had happened in America. They believe that they can actively control and solve incidents in emergencies by bearing arms instead of passively waiting for the police officers. Thus, carrying guns is the most optimal idea for educators in order to protect students against the imminent danger. On the contrary, there is a strong disagreement of the idea of arming teachers from Russ Moore, who is the principal of Shaker Junior High School in Latham, New York. Specifically, he states that “changing laws to allow educators to be armed in schools is flatly bad policy and a bad idea.” He believes that “most people would not have rational thought or skill [on how to control guns]” (Moore 2014). In South Dakota, teachers and other staff in schools have joined the program named “school sentinels” that allows teachers and staff to be armed with weapons. In order to qualify this program, the school faculty has “to be approved by the school board or a law enforcement agency” (Chavez 2018). More importantly, educators have to be trained “eighty hours of use