Arm Teachers With School Supplies, Not Guns

The president of the United States says he wants to arm teachers, to which America’s teachers unofficially but overwhelmingly respond, “Yes! We want to be armed! With textbooks, with computers, with school supplies.”

But not with weapons that take lives, instead of enriching them.

We now have reports that police and security officers – people who are armed with killing weapons and years of training for such awful moments – hesitated before confronting the gunfire they heard inside that high school in Parkland, Fla., last week.

But we think teachers of French verbs and trigonometry will respond appropriately to such situations?

Yeah, right up until the moment when police come charging into the school, and see a grownup carrying a weapon, and don’t know if it’s a teacher or an assailant, and so they open fire without pausing to ask questions.

Over the weekend, I asked an old friend about arming teachers. This is a man who retired a few years back after roughly 35 years of teaching English in high schools all around the Baltimore area.

“Arming teachers?” he said incredulously. “Are you kidding? I’d have been tempted to open fire in half the classes I taught, every day of the week. There were days I’d literally be pulling kids apart who were fighting with each other. There were kids who threatened to get physical with me. Guns would be too tempting.”

He was half-joking when he said the last line. The thought of actually using a weapon on some teenager is repulsive. But he judges it utterly dangerous to arm teachers – and a sign that the president and the National Rifle Association types are simply finding one more way to distract the country from core gun control issues such as background checks and restrictions on which people are allowed to purchase guns.

In the aftermath of the Florida shooting, some of us have learned a new phrase: “Lockdown drills,” which some schools now stage routinely. The term is mentioned the way we once talked of fire drills.

That’s how much they anticipate the possibility of mass shootings now – they have to practice their responses to the previously unthinkable.

But maybe the country’s trying to change. Over the past week we’ve heard of multiple corporations which previously linked arms with the NRA – car rental businesses, airlines, banks – breaking off relations.

It’s not that these companies have suddenly seen the light and realize the error of their thinking on gun control – it’s that they sense the mood of the country changing, and they don’t want to lose customers in a public relations battle.

A month ago, 52 percent of the country said they wanted gun control. Today, the figure is 70 percent. The number arrives on the same morning that we learn the president’s poll numbers have dropped 5 percent over the same month – from 40 to 35 percent.

The simultaneous shifting of such numbers is not coincidental.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.