The Issue of Gun Control in Relation to School Safety

The shock factor seems to have left. No longer seen as valuable lives, but rather minimized to letters and numbers. Kids are dying and nothing is being done. Gun control is an issue that needs to be addressed in America, but it is a long term problem that requires a difficult solution that is likely to pass Congress Students face an imminent threat each day they go to school. This threat hinders their life and their pursuit of happiness, therefore something must be done One of the solutions that could work and could become law reasonably soon is to allow teachers to have weapons in schools.

Allowing teachers to carry weapons would enable them to protect their students more effectively, teachers would no longer have to wait for responders to arrive on scene to begin defenses, and gunmen would be less likely to attack the school if they knew that certain teachers would be armed Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, tomorrow’s doctors, tomorrow’s lawyers.

The children of today are the future Each time an innocent child is murdered the world is stripped of that sacred life, that potential world changer, This is a truth that is self evident: a life lost today is a life lost for the future. The issue is unnecessary death. 297 innocent American lives have been ripped away since 1980 (Kirk). These deaths have all occurred because of school shootings, There is clearly a problem and at some point there must be a solution. This cannot be allowed to continue for it is an unnecessary sacrifice to nothing The long term solution has to be some sort of gun control, but in the short run we can introduce a less radical solution.

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Arming teachers would fulfill the role of a short term, less drastic fix of course, it is not a fix all, but it will help protect innocent lives until a more serious measure can be taken.

Teachers have already taken on the role of laying down their lives in order to protect their students. One of the best examples of this is teacher Victoria Soto at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Soto stepped in to protect her students from a devastating shooter and was able to successfully save some of the lives of her students. She was already stepping into the line of fire and could have been more effective had she been armed (CNN). This provides an example of a time where a teacher could intervene to make a difference. The claim that students would be afraid if their teachers were arm is a widespread one, but the weapons could be concealed so that the students did not know which teachers were and were not armed (Corbett).

The degree to which the students would be afraid would be directly related to how the community and the parents approached the issue, Many larger, public schools have at least one police officer on the school campus. The smaller schools are often left exposed since they cannot afford a guard just in case something bad happens, The smaller schools are left praying on their knees, defenseless Even the larger schools with just one or two officers are not much better off What are the chances they will be able to intervene in the case that a serious situation does arise? If however, teachers were able to carry concealed carry weapons then they could intervene when nearby classrooms were threatened therefore minimizing the time before the attacker is neutralized, For the schools who do not have officers on site the response time is generally a few minutes; this leaves the deadly man armed with an assault weapon time to do whatever he pleases while the innocent teachers and children are sitting ducks.

While some say that protection is the exclusive role of the school resource officer (SRO) and that the role of the teacher is to educate there are times when the SRO is not sufficient. (Hoover) A school safety consultant in Utah considered arming teachers “borderline insanity” and he said that teachers would be forced to take on a “quasi law enforcement agency” rolei (Grossman, Toppo) The fundamental issue is that teachers are already being put in the decision to sacrifice their lives and are choosing to take on this role in order to protect their students, At the end of the day this results in a cost benefit analysis, The costs are clear and there are certainly drawbacks to this proposal, but the benefits are so great. If one less innocent life was stripped away from this earth then it would payoff, Then it would all be worth it.