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Gun control and school safety
Gun control and school safety
Gun control and school safety
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One of the biggest debates in education is how to respond to gun violence in schools. According to BBC, “There were 64 school shootings in 2015” (BBC). One response to the rise in gun violence in schools is to arm teachers. Even our President has mentioned “giving a bonus” (Davis 2) to teachers that The fact that the idea of arming teachers is even being discussed is disappointing. Bringing more guns into a school is not the answer to gun violence. Most people that defend the idea that guns will “help” keep schools safe have basically three points: (1) teachers will be trained in gun safety, (2) it helps deter potential school shooters, and (3) it will make the students feel more safe. Even though there is some truth to those points, I think that the cons of arming teachers vastly outweigh the pros of arming teachers. …show more content…
Not only will it be expensive, but it will be time consuming. The average gun safety class offered by the National Rifle Association is “six hours long, with 11 students, and costs $130” (Yamane 5). Using President Trump’s data-less statistic, let’s say that 10% of teachers in a particular district are eligible to receive gun safety training. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, on average, “there are 254 teachers in a district in Texas” (NCES). Rounding down, that means that 25 teachers in a district would receive the training. About $3250 of money would be spent on gun safety. That is money that could be used in other ways. Another aspect of gun safety training is the time commitment. As stated above, the typical gun safety course is six hours long. Personally, I would not be comfortable with only six hours of gun safety. I do not think that six hours is enough time to train teachers how to defend
Michael Eisinger an eighth grade science teacher says, "If a gunman is going to cause violence in a school, they are going to have the element of surprise," "My guess is that they would still be able to shoot teachers, students or whoever else they wanted before some sort of coherent response materialized. (Huffington Post) Arming teachers isn’t going to solve the problem. We still will end up with deaths in schools. The gunman may decide to take the professors gun as well, which will result in the enemy having another harmful weapon.
Firearm safety is the important piece in reducing the deaths and firearm abuse, and it should be made mandatory in schools. The first step in making firearm safety mandatory in schools is to find programs that will teach it. Thankfully, there are many programs that will do it. The NRA, which stands for National Rifle Association, has a program that teaches gun safety (Eddie Eagle GunSafe). There is also a program called STAR, which stands for Straight Talk About Risks (Moore), that teaches gun safety.
Everyone knows that parents’ first worry is the safety of their children. With the increase of violence in schools, parents have started to wonder if their children are really safe in the school setting. Shootings like Sandy Hook and Columbine left parents, administrators, and educators feeling the need to be proactive towards children’s safety. Reacting to situations like these is not good enough when children’s lives are on the line. Administration has started to brainstorm different ways to help insure the protection of their students. The idea of having teachers carry concealed weapons has been on the front burner for quite some time. As a result of this extreme idea, insurance companies have started to increase or even cancel policies with schools that have armed teachers because of the high risk they are putting themselves at. Parents and administrators also worry about the idea of children getting their hands on one of the teachers’ weapons and injuring themselves or other students. Because this idea seems quite extreme, I believe there are other alternatives that are less dramatic and more positively out looked, such as having armed security guards in schools.
Since the time we are born until the moment we die we are taught to follow a specific routine in our lives without questioning the why or the consequences our actions bring. During that course humans tend to become so familiar with our routines that when an unexplained incident occurs, we panic because it is something we’ve never been exposed to, an example to this are the killings of innocent people whom we care for in environments where security and education are supposed to be the priority. In our eyes campuses are supposed to be protected by those who wear uniforms and are trained professionals that are ready to deal with such situations, so why allow a law that will grant any civilian the right to carry guns on campus,
... a high school student, I don’t take much stock in the safety codes and drills in place to keep students safe in the event of a shooting. I would feel much safer knowing my teacher has the ability to protect the class, rather than hide and lock the door. An educator is responsible for the students in their class. They are responsible for their education and their safety while the children are in their classroom. The safety of fifteen or more students would be much more easily secured by one person if that person was armed. Promoting teachers to arm themselves also prevents school shootings; criminals don’t attack a victim that can fight back. At least 60% of school attacks would be prevented with an armed faculty warning sign. School faculty members should be armed to secure the safety of the countries students, and in hand prevent the majority of potential shootings.
Just over 50 million children attend public elementary school, justifying the production of 50 million guns. If the average handgun is $400, that will be an estimated cost of 40 billion dollars. However, if kept in good condition, the guns can be reused for many years and pass from child to child as they get older. There are some school districts on their own, currently, that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security measures annually, and this could all be reduced by arming the children. There would no longer need to be metal detectors or increased security paid by the hour. This money could instead be spent elsewhere to help pay for the initial cost of obtaining said
In “Vulnerable Schools Need Protection: Guns, Training For Teachers may be the answer”, published in a 2008 edition of the Chicago Tribune, David McGrath argues that some teachers should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon for protection. First, McGrath states that if a random psychotic gunman were searching for someplace to attack, his classroom would make an easy target. He feels that if he was trained and armed, his class would not be trapped without a chance of survival because he would be able to defend against the gunman. Sec...
School shootings are still happening and we have to put a stop to it. We need to have these teachers prepared and ready to fight. Students to deserve to have their lives out to rest knowing something could have been done that’s why we need to have these teachers armed. This is a cold world if someone enters a school with a weapon teachers need to have their weapon ready too for the sack of their children. A school is a fun place to learn but to also keep safe. This is why teachers should be armed.
In a couple of years, American people had very tragic and painful times, in past years we saw elementary and a high school shooting. After seeing innocent students getting killed in their school, some politicians of this country are trying to change a couple of the laws for the schools in the United States. They want all the teachers to carry a concealed weapon at the school, and nobody will know if the teachers are carrying a gun at the school or not. This law does not require to tell the parents of the students, that their kid’s teacher is carrying a concealed weapon a weapon while he/she teaching them. I believe that teachers should not be allowed to carry a concealed weapon at the school because it is unsafe for the students, teachers are
Schools were once traditionally viewed as a safe place for children, teenagers, and adults. The educational setting coupled with community involvement gave no reason for violence to occur in schools. As years progressed, the occurrence of violence in school shocked communities across the nation, calling for state lawmakers and school districts to produce a solution to prevent these acts from occurring. Events such as the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado urged schools throughout the U.S. to increase their security measures with more stringent policies and procedures while spending millions of dollars on security equipment from security cameras to metal detectors. While schools increase their safety measures to prevent another major incident from occurring, such as a suspect with a firearm (active shooter) from entering school property, some of the security measures have not been effective. An example is the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where the shooter was able to bypass a locked door which is one of the security measures the school had in place, making personnel visiting the school required to request entrance into the building (Barron).
Throughout the years of education, kids go to school to get an education, to hang with friends, to get excise, and many other things. America should have armed officers in in public schools. Since kids are spending a majority of their time throughout the day and year at school, they should feel safe in that environment. That can soon change with school security falling behind with this current growth of school shooting. Schools shootings have begun occurring more often in the United States from elementary schools all the way up to colleges. How should school systems fix this problem? One solution that could be the most effective is having multiple armed officers in schools. Let’s begin with some major school shootings that were lacking armed officers, when the resource officer successfully stopped a potential shooting, and reasons why we should have an armed officer.
With all of the school shootings that have happened lately I’m sure that most parents would want their child protected at any cost. As of January 2014, there had been an average of one school shooting every other school day. What are the schools doing to protect our kids when they are away from us at school? What more can be done to protect them? We are not able to be with our kids while they are at school, but we surely want to know that if a gunman does try to enter the school, there are measures in place to protect them. Should teachers be allowed to carry a handgun while in class? In my position argument I will discuss reasons that I feel that teachers should be able to carry while in class.
That is why Rebekah Elliott’s article “The Real School Safety Debate: Why Legislative Responses Should Focus on Schools and Not on Guns” would be valuable to include. Elliot writes that to properly provide safety into schools is to put more funding into higher security and individual school safety programs. Like many writers, she agrees that the Sandy Hook incident shifted America’s views on the second amendment but she believes that having armed teachers could be a safety risk in itself. Her argument is that although it would be more cost efficient to arm teachers than to hire more security, it could increase the liability for negligence if there was a result in injuring a student (2015
Allowing teachers to carry guns could help lower school shootings. “While some believe tighter gun controls are the answer, others believe the best solution comes in giving more people — like teachers and administrators — more training and more access to firearms that can save lives as well as take them away” (Evensen guns and teachers). “Our organization
Out of the 102 teachers that responded, 62% of those teachers said that they were for teaching gun safety in schools. Of those 62%, about 54% say that they feel that police or trained military personnel should teach these safety classes in the schools.