The Bunkhouse Chronicle - Arming Teachers

The arrest earlier this month of a teacher at Newtown Middle School, in Connecticut - in the same district as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting - for carrying a firearm on school grounds has reignited the debate over arming teachers.

This teacher happened to have a valid Connecticut permit, and there were no students on campus that day, but let's set aside the legal and constitutional questions and focus on the question of arming teachers as a policy.

At least nine states have passed legislation allowing for teachers to arm themselves on campus, and even some districts in California - which claims some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation - have recently and quietly allowed qualified and properly trained teachers to carry concealed weapons.

NBC News Affiliate KSEE quoted Kingsburg Joint Union High School District Superintendant Randy Morris, "It's unfortunate we live in a society where we have to even consider these measures, but the reality is we do."

The District's 5-0 vote to approve selected, and anonymous, staff to carry firearms was also supported by Kingsburg Police Chief Neil Dadian. "During Sandy Hook, six staff-members died, 20 children died, and it lasted less than five minutes, so that's about one death every twelve seconds - imagine if one of those teachers was also armed."

If you can imagine a horrible episode of violence, it has probably happened on some campus, either in America or abroad. And believe it or not, America doesn't lead the world in episodes of active-killers on campus. The appropriate takeaway from the horrendous and growing library of school killings seems to be this: it can happen anywhere - even in Sisters - and complacency in the security arena is deadly.

Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, among the foremost experts on the study of violence, and on killings in our schools, whose books include "On Combat," "On Killing," and "Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie, and Video Game Violence," repeatedly bemoans the state of denial that many parents, administrators, and teachers seem to be in when it comes to the realities of deadly school violence.

He uses fire safety as an excellent contrast.

In the modern era, no one would consider building a school without fire alarms, fire sprinklers, and fire exits, but Grossman rightly suggests that we routinely ask our students and teachers to remain vulnerable to any number of deadly on-campus - or inside the classroom - violence scenarios.

Says Grossman, "But you try to prepare for violence - the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill our kids in schools - and people think you're paranoid. They think you're crazy. ...They're in denial."

As a former SWAT team leader, with hundreds of hours of active-killer training and experience, I have experienced this denial first-hand in the form of uncooperative school administrators who didn't want us to train after hours in their schools, or teachers with fatalistic attitudes toward the safety of their students, and even themselves.

Most active-killer incidents are over in minutes, sometimes in seconds, and with response times to Sisters a logistical challenge for law enforcement, it seems a wise and responsible gesture to allow teachers the option of armed defense. In today's world, teachers should have, and should probably embrace, every option necessary to protect their students, and themselves, from a spasm of horrific violence.

It seems less like a prudent measure, in fact, than an actual duty and responsibility.

Single entry points, locked classroom doors, armed security, and student resource officers are a starting point, but they require 100 percent success, every day. A single failure anywhere in that layered defense can allow for an incident of horrific violence against unarmed and virtually defenseless innocents. Simply hiding behind walls and doors may not be the best answer. Bullets go through walls. They go through doors, and unarmed security is a virtual waste of time, energy, and money.

Not every teacher will want to carry a concealed firearm. But some will, and those teachers should be rigorously trained by local law-enforcement as force multipliers in the event of an active-killer incident.

It is a sad testimony and regrettable symptom of our culture that we need to have this conversation at all, but we do, and in the most realistic terms possible.

Today, where movies, music, television, and other media routinely divorce the minds of consumers from the true and horrific consequences of violence, the very least we can do is embrace the notion that predictable is preventable, and give teachers the option to become sheepdogs - heaven forbid they ever need to -instead of sheep.