Arming Teachers

Arming Teachers

In Texas, where reality seems to be making a comeback. From the August 16, 2008 Austin American-Statesman:

HARROLD — A tiny school district in Texas may be the first in the nation to allow teachers and staff members to carry guns for protection when classes begin this month, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

School board members in Harrold, which is 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth near the Oklahoma border, approved a district policy change in October so employees can carry concealed firearms to deter and protect against school shootings. However, the people who want to carry guns must follow certain requirements.

Teachers and staff members who carry a pistol must have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun; be authorized by the district to carry it; receive training in crisis management and hostile situations; and carry ammunition that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls.

Superintendent David Thweatt said the community is a 30-minute drive from the sheriff's office, leaving students and teachers without protection. He said the lone campus in the district, which has 110 students, is 500 feet from U.S. 287, which could make it a target.

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog," Thweatt told the Star-Telegram.

Thweatt said officials researched the gun policy and considered other options for about a year before approving the policy change.

He said the district has other security measures in place to prevent a school shooting.

"The naysayers think (a shooting) won't happen here. If something were to happen here, I'd much rather be calling a parent to tell them that their child is OK because we were able to protect them," Thweatt said.

Is this something to celebrate? I don't think so. But consider the alternatives. We've seen a bunch of tragedies over the last few years where sometimes adults, sometimes children, have come to school with the intention of committing mass murder--and for some reason, the laws prohibiting them from having a gun aren't very strong deterrents.

Many of these disturbed creatures weren't expecting to ever be tried. All the gun-free school laws in the world wouldn't do any good at all. Remember the pedophile who barricaded himself inside a Amish school in Pennsylvania last year with the intent of molesting the girls, then committed suicide? Or the man who took girls hostage and molested them in Bailey, Colorado a few days earlier? He wasn't planning to be taken alive.

Authorizing teachers to be armed to defend themselves and their students is a sign of how tremendously wrong our society has gone, largely because of the delusional ideas that caused deinstitutionalization.