Arming teachers already happening

[Lord Falcon]

I heard on MSNBC that they are already arming teachers in several states. I'm not gonna get involved in this discussion, I'm just bringing it to everyone's attention so you can discuss it.

[fordlltwm]

I can only assume you mean this?

Please post the links / story dude, you'll only get flamed otherwise

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50302316/#.UNzfI_K0OSo

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah — English teacher Kevin Leatherbarrow holds a license to carry a concealed weapon and doesn't see anything wrong with arming teachers in the aftermath of the deadly Connecticut school shooting.

"We're sitting ducks," said Leatherbarrow, who works at a Utah charter school. "You don't have a chance in hell. You're dead — no ifs, ands or buts."

Gun-rights advocates in Utah agree and were offering six hours of training Thursday in handling concealed weapons for 200 Utah teachers in the latest effort to arm teachers to confront school assailants.

In Ohio, a firearms group said it was launching a test program in tactical firearms training for 24 teachers. Arizona's attorney general is proposing a change to state law to allow an educator in each school to carry a gun.

The moves come after the National Rifle Association proposed placing an armed officer at each of the nation's schools after a gunman on Dec. 14 killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

There are already police officers in some of the nation's schools. Parents and educators, however, have questioned how safe the NRA proposal would keep kids, whether it would be economically feasible and how it would alter student life.

Some educators say it is dangerous to allow guns. Among the dangers are teachers being overpowered for their weapons or students getting them and accidentally or purposely shooting classmates.

"It's a terrible idea," said Carol Lear, a chief lawyer for the Utah Office of Education. "It's a horrible, terrible, no-good, rotten idea."

Utah educators say they would ban guns if they could, but legislators left them with no choice. State law forbids schools, districts or college campuses from imposing their own gun restrictions.

Educators say they have no way of knowing how many teachers are armed. Gun-rights advocates estimate 1 percent of Utah teachers, or 240, are licensed to carry concealed weapons. It's not known how many do so at school.

Gun-rights advocates say teachers can act more quickly than law enforcement in the critical first few minutes to protect children from the kind of deadly shooting that took place in Connecticut.

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"We're not suggesting that teachers roam the halls" for an armed intruder, said Clark Aposhian, chairman of the Utah Shooting Sports Council, the state's leading gun lobby. "They should lock down the classroom. But a gun is one more option if the shooter" breaks into a classroom, he said.

The council said it would waive its $50 fee for the training. Instruction will feature plastic guns and a major emphasis will be for people who are facing deadly threats to announce they have a gun and retreat or take cover before trying to shoot, he said.

"Mass shootings may still be rare, but that doesn't help you when the monster comes in."

At the class, teachers offered their fingerprints for a permit as an instructor in the "psychology of mass violence" kicked off the gun class.

"I just bought a bra holster," said Jessica Fiveash, a 32-year-old Utah teacher and wife of a retired Army sergeant who grew up shooting and said she had no hesitation packing a gun at school. "Women can't really carry a gun on their hip."

Utah is among few states that let people carry licensed concealed weapons into public schools without exception, the National Conference of State Legislatures says in a 2012 compendium of state gun laws.

Leatherbarrow said he often felt threatened while working at an inner-city school in Buffalo, N.Y., where he got a license to carry a pistol. He moved less than a year ago to Utah, where he feels safer.

But he said gun violence can break out anywhere. He said he was highly trained in handling guns — and was taking criticism from parents who don't appreciate his views on school safety.

"I'm in agreement not everybody should be carrying firearms in school. They're not trained. But for some parents to think we're cowboys, that frustrates me," he said. "I wish parents would understand."

Posted without comment

[Lord Falcon]

My mistake. I apologize. But like I said, I'm not going to be getting involved in this discussion.

[Zaune]

My mistake. I apologize. But like I said, I'm not going to be getting involved in this discussion.

This one shows wisdom far beyond his post count.

[Dr Roberts]

No more mention of Suicide?

[Prannon]

On topic to the conversation....

I'm in the crowd that this is beyond a bad idea, because you cannot assume that the unwashed masses, teachers or otherwise, will be able to properly manage a shooting crisis with an armed gunman (aka aiming, avoiding collateral damage, etc). If you were going to arm teachers, well.. it had better come with some serious, no-nonsense level training where the slightest mistake gets you canned. And even then I think it's not a good idea. Just seems to be feeding into the hyper-weaponization of the US these days...

[Aaron MkII]

You know...we've covered this in exhaustive detail in the other threads. I'm as happy to discuss this stuff as any gun owner but why don't we just have one huge thread?

[Knife]

Ah, my state leading the way. Blah.

It's a bad idea. If you want a gun in school to protect, you tax the money and then pay it to a trained professional. It's a bad idea because the last thing we need is a bunch of half trained yahoos running around with a gun in schools. The concealed carry in Utah is a joke, they totally took all the teeth out of it years ago. You used to have to have range time and at least be marginally trained in the use of a gun, now all that is gone. Getting a concealed weapons permit in Utah is about as hard as getting a library card.

If it is so worth it to have a guy/girl in school with a weapon, you pay the money it's worth to get a trained individual in there who knows when, where, why, and how to use it. This is so a bad idea.

[Dr Roberts]

This will go perfectly when a teacher has a breakdown won't it?

[Malivotti]

Let's see, if the idea goes into effect and shooting happens what then? If the person in question is armed but does the smart thing and bunker down with the kids is the person/school on the hook for not engaging the shooter? I can see some lawyer filling suit if it happens that way since the school had the person on site with training and resources to engage the shooter and kids still died.

Also as someone that has had weapon training in the past I have an idea how hard it can be to hit paper target with no stress or adrenaline in my system and no distractions and time to aim, and with way too many friends and family in the military I have bare idea how nasty a school shooting environment is for trained law enforcement, and this gun right group is offering only six(!!) hours of training? Six hours is not enough training for that situation, hell 60 hours wouldn't be enough in my opinion.

This will also add to the problems that any police will have to responding, now they'll have to worry about the shooter and the other people that are armed on site.

This idea is so bad it's horrible.

[dragon]

I see nothing wrong with armed guards and maybe a few under lock and key for extreme situations. But allowing teachers to bring guns is a recipe for disaster. I can only imagine if the teacher loses their cool and shots a student. But if they really want to allow it then they better make sure the teacher is well trained not only on how to use the weapon but when as well. Also perhaps have a good weapon locker where the teacher must store it and it can only be opened in the event of a lock down or similar.

Either way they would definitely need to come up with a sound plan and not a knee jerk reaction.

Kind of off topic but when I graduated high school in 95 many students had rifles in their truck cabs on school grounds. Hell we had only student that road a horse to school and carried a rifle. Granted the school was on the edge of city limits in Montana. Now that subdivisions grew around the school they are not allowed to have weapons anymore.

[Korvan]

Another problem with arming teachers, is it makes the teacher the obvious target. If the gunman gains access to the classroom on some sort of pretext, they can take out the teacher with surprise and proceed with the massacre as usual. Armed air marshals on planes works not only because of the high level of training of the marshal, but also their anonymity. To duplicate that, you'd have to arm a random kid in the class...

I guess if every teacher in the school was armed, you'd be able to limit the killing to a single class room, maybe.

[dragon]

Truthfully I'd rather the person go after the teacher hoping it would give the students time to get away or hide if possible. There's something about kids and animals that I would rather see an adult hurt instead of the kids. Maybe it's because an adult has better chance of fighting back and can take more punishment or some other odd reason. And I hate kids but hurting kids is just wrong whether it's physical or mental.

[Col. Crackpot]

\I've been keeping my mouth shut on this topic, but 'm sick and tired of the one size fits all mentality that has been so rampant in the gun debate as of late. People in bumfuck nowhere are lucky to have a cop half an hour away. New York City you trip over a half dozen cops crossing 7th avenue at Broadway. Bumfuck nowhere citizen has to be more self reliant in just about everything including the protection of themselves/family/property etc and New Yorker has the benefits of all the resources of an urban lifestyle and doesn't need to do so much on his/her own. Is it so hard to understand that in a town of a couple hundred people in the middle of nowhere that people may have to multitask and serve as teacher/cop/dentist/whatever in various permutations? Someone explain to me how is that not logical without resorting to herpderp country people are teh stoopid.

edit, spelling

[Zaune]

Because even bumfuck nowhere has a county sheriff's department, or some arrangement with the state police to provide a 911 response? I could see there being a problem responding promptly to an armed intruder at a farmhouse or cabin way out in the boonies, but nobody builds elementary schools at the end of an unpaved road five miles from the nearest town.

[Knife]

Indeed. Schools generally aren't out in the boonies. They are usually centralized, even in small towns. If we are that freaked out and that worried over our kids, as we probably should be, that we're thinking of arming volunteer teachers, perhaps it's a big enough of a deal to alter police patrol patterns a bit. Or fucking tax a bit more and hire a dedicated guard.

That's what I don't get. If it is such a big deal to contemplate such actions, why isn't it a big enough deal to pass a tax hike and hire an actual trained person to do the job?

[Nathan F]

Because even bumfuck nowhere has a county sheriff's department, or some arrangement with the state police to provide a 911 response? I could see there being a problem responding promptly to an armed intruder at a farmhouse or cabin way out in the boonies, but nobody builds elementary schools at the end of an unpaved road five miles from the nearest town.

Not necessarily taking a side in this debate, but just playing devil's advocate here: There are plenty of rural school districts that have schools located in remote areas, or on the outskirts of town. And when the entire county's police force exists in the form of 5 or 6 deputies, the nearest one could very easily be 15 miles away.

For instance, in my home county, there are two elementary schools, one in the county seat, and the other in another satellite town. The smaller satellite town has one part-time police officer, relying on the sheriff's department and state police to provide most police work, which may or may not have an officer nearby.

That being said, I'm divided on the issue of generally arming teachers. Trained professionals would probably be better in this situation, but having one or two trained semi-professionals may not be bad either.

[Zaune]

Not necessarily taking a side in this debate, but just playing devil's advocate here: There are plenty of rural school districts that have schools located in remote areas, or on the outskirts of town. And when the entire county's police force exists in the form of 5 or 6 deputies, the nearest one could very easily be 15 miles away.

If an entire county's police force consists of five or six deputies, that county probably has several much more serious and immediate public safety concerns than the threat of school shootings.

[Nathan F]

Not necessarily taking a side in this debate, but just playing devil's advocate here: There are plenty of rural school districts that have schools located in remote areas, or on the outskirts of town. And when the entire county's police force exists in the form of 5 or 6 deputies, the nearest one could very easily be 15 miles away.

If an entire county's police force consists of five or six deputies, that county probably has several much more serious and immediate public safety concerns than the threat of school shootings.

You'd be surprised how often that a large, rural county will only have a few deputies, along with one or two state police and a fish and game officer located there. It's really not that uncommon in the US and Canada.

[Col. Crackpot]

If an entire county's police force consists of five or six deputies, that county probably has several much more serious and immediate public safety concerns than the threat of school shootings.

Up until two weeks ago that could have been said about most places. You truly don't understand just how vast rural North America is do you?

[TheFeniX]

Because even bumfuck nowhere has a county sheriff's department, or some arrangement with the state police to provide a 911 response? I could see there being a problem responding promptly to an armed intruder at a farmhouse or cabin way out in the boonies, but nobody builds elementary schools at the end of an unpaved road five miles from the nearest town.

Hahahaha, holy shit. Are you fucking serious? I've done work in probably a dozen Texas Elementary schools that would qualify as "way out in the boonies." Many of these school districts are in cities that aren't large enough to host an actual local police department, instead relying on County Annexs that may or may not have stationed cops at them at any given time. These areas have cops that individually have to cover dozens of miles of real-estate as part of their job.

Then you have shit like what happened in Kendleton and Fulshear (towns big enough to have a local police force) with corruption leading to the entire staff getting gutted, leaving county cops (once again) to handle enforcement for the area. WRT Kendleton, the closest annex I can think of would be Rosenberg which is a good 15-25 minutes away. Since Lamar and Terry are in Rosenberg, you could always find cops roaming the campus, but schools even in the same district could be 30 miles from each other (such as the elementary school in Fulshear).

I talked to one cop for a district (won't name the location) where he by himself (as a county cop) had to do the rounds at all the schools in the district. He said, in an average 8 hour day, he spent 4-5 of them just driving between schools. He joked that his expenses for gas and tires was likely bigger than his salary.

[StarSword]

@Zaune: I actually live in one of the counties these guys are talking about (Chatham County, North Carolina), and I can vouch. The county seat, which we live three miles north of, has maybe two patrol cars out at any given time. And though Google can't give me the exact numbers (tried at least a dozen permutations of "Chatham County NC sheriff's department size"), I'd guess no more than twenty deputies for a county covering 709 square miles with a population of 63,505 at the last census. We've got three schools that I know of out in the backwoods (Perry Harrison, Northwood High, and my alma mater Woods Charter School), and I've only really explored the northern half.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yep, I grew up in an area with an elementary school 15 minutes from the nearest regular police response, too. It's damned normal in the US, even in Western Washington, the more densely populated part of Washington State, which is hardly the least densely populated state in the union, but more like average.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Not necessarily taking a side in this debate, but just playing devil's advocate here: There are plenty of rural school districts that have schools located in remote areas, or on the outskirts of town. And when the entire county's police force exists in the form of 5 or 6 deputies, the nearest one could very easily be 15 miles away.

If an entire county's police force consists of five or six deputies, that county probably has several much more serious and immediate public safety concerns than the threat of school shootings.

I live in one of these counties. The county seat, where I live, has six cops of its own, counting the police chief, so that at any given time there are two on duty. Only one other town in the county has its own police "force," and its even smaller. We do have a Sherriff's department, but they don't patrol or do regular police work, they only serve warrants. So most of the county relies on the state police, I think we have ten for the whole county.

I got robbed at work a few years back, and it took the state police around 45 minutes to show up after I called. Someone from the local newspaper talked to me before the cops got there.

[Alyeska]

Indeed. Schools generally aren't out in the boonies. They are usually centralized, even in small towns. If we are that freaked out and that worried over our kids, as we probably should be, that we're thinking of arming volunteer teachers, perhaps it's a big enough of a deal to alter police patrol patterns a bit. Or fucking tax a bit more and hire a dedicated guard.

That's what I don't get. If it is such a big deal to contemplate such actions, why isn't it a big enough deal to pass a tax hike and hire an actual trained person to do the job?

Where I grew up we had a single State Trooper to cover our entire town of 1,500 people. Thats it. No police. No sheriffs department. And we had a school with 150 kids K-8.

Not everyone grows up in a heavily urban area with the resources that come with it.