Teachers, Get Your Guns!

Recently, Rep. Frank Lasee (R) suggested that arming teachers in Wisconsin might be a viable way to protect their schools.

Hello? I thought the point was to keep guns OUT of our schools, not introduce them into an environment that is already crackling with fear and the threat of violence.

In his speech, Lasee referred to teachers in Thailand who are carrying guns. Thailand is involved in a two-year struggle with Muslim separatists that has oftentimes turned bloody. Their schoolteachers are considered part of the government, so some of them carry weapons to school.

Thailand, however, is a long way from the Dairy State and there haven't been any recent struggles with extremists in Wisconsin that I am aware of.

Yes, we have seen our share of school violence here in the United States, especially this past week. Hearts all over the world were broken as we learned of young Amish girls and young high school women who were either sexually abused or faced the threat of sexual abuse before being shot by their captors. This, after all, is America and things like that don't happen here, right? Atrocities such as these should only be happening in other countries, third world countries, countries that are not as socially advanced as our own.

Wrong. The past several years have taught us that gunmen storming schools, shooting students, and faculty and then themselves, can happen anywhere. We need a deterrent to this kind of crime, but arming your local school faculty members is not the answer.

Rep. Lasee has a plan to introduce legislation allowing personnel at schools to carry concealed weapons. Of course, he is first going to need to find a way around the federal law that prohibits firearms on school property.

I worry about a lawmaker who would work under the assumption that fighting violence in schools requires carrying a weapon of violence to that very place. There is something alarmingly skewed in that logic. If he managed to find away around the federal legislation and if the law did, indeed, pass in Wisconsin, how long would it be until a completely different kind of tragedy unfolded in a school?

It is feasible, in some ironic twist, that a firearm brought into a school to help protect its students, could actually become their downfall. It is not far fetched to imagine that a student, depressed, possibly even suicidal, could wrest a weapon away from a teacher and use it to bring harm not only to himself, but also to his classmates.

What would stop a teacher, overtaken by some unexplainable urge, from using their weapon to hurt a student or hold children hostage? We know that there have been school faculty members who have preyed on students. A gun could easily provide a way for someone like this, with pedophiliac tendencies, to force a child into a sexual relationship.

Danger comes from many sources but a teacher carrying a concealed weapon should not be one of them. We need to make schools safer for our children, but arming the very people who our children are in the care of for seven hours of every weekday is not the way to do it. It would only add one more evil to those that the children are already exposed to.

What will keep our schools safe? We need to educate pupils on the danger of guns. Principals, teachers and parents need to be able to recognize a young person who seems depressed and there should be numerous resources available both in and out of the schools to help them.

To minimize the threat of a dangerous person walking through the front doors of schoolhouses, all doors should be locked on the outside, while still being operable from the inside. I have heard there have been parents who have complained about the hassle of locked doors it difficult to get into the school during the day when they are there to volunteer or attend meetings, but I feel compelled to say that a little bit of inconvenience is a small price to pay for the safety of several hundred children.

Even through their hurt and anguish, the Amish people of Pennsylvania forgave the man who murdered their daughters. Perhaps we should take a lesson from this community, which espouses non-violence and simple living and we would find that our own world would become less violent.