Friday, March 23, 2018 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
View more of the Sun's opinion section
Some people think arming teachers is a good idea, but what stops us from going further? Should we arm doctors, shopkeepers, religious leaders? If you don’t want your friendly neighborhood bakery owner or pediatrician with a gun in their side pocket, why should we consider arming schoolteachers?
The idea of a “good teacher with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun” is honestly one of the worst “solutions” that’s being considered since the Parkland, Fla., school massacre. Bringing guns into the classroom means plenty of new issues that schools have to tackle. Issues like teacher training, parent and staff consent, legal approval, the actual buying, maintaining and safe storage of the guns.
Schools have always been asked to do more with less in educating our students, and every year a new issue comes up that they are forced to address with limited funding, few resources and scarce support. And now we introduce yet another problem that our overburdened school systems have to deal with.
Virtually every national organization representing educators and parents opposes this idea. So, if the majority of superintendents, principals, teachers and parents don’t want guns in the classroom, who does? The National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers, who would benefit from the sale of more guns.
Why are we listening to people with no professional teaching experience? Instead of gun salesmen and enthusiasts, we should listen to teachers who spend years training and analyzing child behaviors, learning successful classroom management, becoming subject matter experts, and understanding what it takes to be an effective educator. There’s a reason Gun Safety 101 isn’t a required teacher training course.
Something that could actually help with making schools safer, such as hiring enough school counselors, needs to be done. The middle school I attend in Virginia has 1,800 students, and just six counselors. That’s 300 students per counselor, an impossible number of kids for one person to help. If something as important as having enough counselors is already underfunded, where is the money that will support teachers being armed going to come from?
But, let’s say the money to cover every school’s list of funding needs is found, and that additional dollars are also suddenly available for teachers to get the strong training they must have on how to handle firearms — training that makes them as effective as the most skilled of law enforcement officers. Let’s say that said guns are locked up in such a way that they are both easy to reach in the event of a shooting, but impossible to be handled incorrectly by students. Even if this utopia could be achieved, has anyone considered a student’s perspective on this?
Most adults have overlooked, ignored or not even asked what the students, those most affected by this solution, think. Because we cannot yet vote for the politicians making these decisions, we are told to be quiet and let the adults make the decisions. We are told that we are too young, too immature, or not intelligent enough to make sense of these types of matters. We are told to trust in the people in office to do what is right for us.
Recently, I attended a town hall about gun control, hosted by my congressman. It addressed a number of issues, and I was struck by how many children that showed up. These kids, mostly fourth- and fifth-graders, were staging protests at their schools, organizing walk-outs, speaking out. They were being brave in a society that tells them to be seen and not heard, in a world where children aren’t allowed to have opinions until they are an “official” adult.
Our status quo dictates that children must respect their elders and not talk back, be calm and just go play. But I am disgusted when I see that children with restricted speech, restricted options and resources, and restricted rights are doing so much more on gun control than the adults around them. The children are angry, and we are done following the rules society sets out for us. We have opinions, and we want them to be heard.
I believe I speak for most children when I say: We do not want to live and grow up in an environment where our kindergarten teachers carry handguns.
Ava Michelman is a middle-schooler in Virginia. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
