Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
In your neck of the woods bro Ohio :
[COLOR="DarkRed"]Elementary school cancels classes after nearby church invites members to bring AR-15 rifles to a commitment ceremony because they believe it's the Bible's 'rod of iron'
|
I had some thoughts about Trump's plan to arm teachers.
1. He has suggested arming teachers who used to be special forces and highly trained. I have no issue with that. However, I have known several hundred teachers and have yet to meet one who used to be special forces or highly trained. In fact the only two that even come close were a teacher who was a former police officer and a teacher in the coast guard. The former police officer was a woman, quite petite, and hadn't been in the police for over 10 years. The coast guard guy would be worse, his attendance was very poor, having been called out frequently. Therefore I find it completely unrealistic to think you would find 10 or 20% of teachers suitably trained. In my experience you would be lucky to find 1%.
2. He has suggested that the teachers with guns would be a secret. I find that to be a terrible and unrealistic idea. First, if I was one of these armed teachers (I have had experience firing a gun which probably puts me into the 20% group for NY) I would want to have frequent drills. We currently have fire drills and various drills for these kind of attacks. Every student in the school would learn who were the teachers with the guns. Second, I would hate to be "incognito" knowing that SWAT team was coming to take down a shooter. I would want a special jacket so that innocent kids could get out of the way and so SWAT team wouldn't shoot me.
3. How does this work? Do I guard a corner of the hallway or do I run to where I hear gunshots? It seems like a lose/lose to me. My school is on the third floor of our building, a different school is on each floor. If I hear shots downstairs and go downstairs only to have the shooter come upstairs and shoot up my hallway I would be blamed. If I stay upstairs while the shooter shoots up the school downstairs I would be blamed.
4. Where are you going to keep these guns? It is completely unrealistic to have your gun in a holster. Kids in high school do not give you space the way you might give a cop. The only thing that makes sense to me is to have them in safes in the hallway like fire extinguishers so that whoever is trained and available could quickly run to the safe and get it. Unless you can show me a working model of these safes that would make sense the whole plan seems idiotic.
5. Our building is 5 floors. You would need at least 4 people on each floor (at the four corners) and to be fair you probably want 8. To get 8 you probably need 12 who are trained (teachers are frequently out of the building at required trainings, etc). That is closer to 30% of our staff, not 20%. So then we are talking about 60 guns and 60 safes per school. Is this just some kind of marketing ploy? I assume the cost would be at least $20,000 per school, where does this money come from? Because to be honest I would much rather buy a class set of working laptops.
6. I was joking with my students today that if I was expected to shoot a kid with a machine gun in the midst of all the chaos I would have to practice shooting kids in more controlled situations first. But, joking aside, you can't expect this to work unless these teachers are given significant training, in the building, perhaps on Saturday's. That would involve per session for the teachers (60 of them) and for the cops who come in and set up the drill. A single Saturday could run the school $10,000 and you would definitely want to have a bare minimum of 2 drills per year like that.