Should teachers carry guns?

Arms on a school campus can halt school shootings and mitigate the damage

Question: Should teachers carry guns?
Position‹2 of 2: Yes, teachers should carry guns.
Argument‹3 of 3: Arms on a school campus can halt school shootings and mitigate the damage

During lockdown situations, classes are often trapped and are essentially sitting ducks. Having a firearm allows the class to have a chance to get out of the situation if a shooter decides to target the class. School shooters are also more likely to back down if there are firearms present.

The argument

The argument builds from an existing policy to a proposed extension of it, in two steps. The first concerns armed civilians generally: the presence of concealed carry laws in respective states has been effective in reducing crime rates, which on this reading is indicative that aggregate crime reduction in all states throughout the US could be achieved through the adoption of concealed carry laws. The mechanism assumed is deterrence — a person contemplating a violent crime cannot know which bystanders are armed, so the possibility that any of them might be raises the expected cost of attempting it anywhere. The second step moves that reasoning onto school grounds, where a version of it already operates. There is an established efficacy in School Resource Officer presence: an armed first responder stationed on site with the purpose of decreasing response time to threats. The value of the role rests on a feature of school shootings — the harm accumulates in the minutes before anyone with the means to intervene arrives, so the interval between the first shot and the first armed response is the variable that determines how many casualties there are. Armed teachers are presented as a further reduction of that same interval rather than as a new idea. School staff who choose to carry, and are fully trained to do so, are well-equipped to reduce this response time even further, since they are already distributed throughout the building rather than stationed at one point within it. That would decrease the probability of increased casualties in the event of a shootout, while also deterring criminal activity on school campuses in the first place — the deterrent effect claimed for concealed carry, applied to the places where an attacker currently has the strongest expectation of meeting no resistance at all.

Premises

[P1]Concealed carry laws have been shown to reduce crime rates in states that adopt them. [P2] Armed first responders on campus, such as School Resource Officers, reduce response time to threats and deter violence. [P3] Trained armed teachers would further shorten response time and act as an additional deterrent to school shootings. [C] Therefore, teachers should be permitted to carry guns in order to halt school shootings and mitigate their damage.

Counter-arguments

Teachers do not receive the same training as School Resource Officers. They also do not sign up for the same liability/job description. Therefore, teachers should not be viewed as equivalent to School Resource Officers.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The concealed-carry literature is contested rather than settled, and it concerns adults carrying in public places. It says nothing about arming staff inside schools, which is the practice actually at issue. [Rejecting P2] School Resource Officers are sworn full-time officers, selected, trained, supervised and insured for that role. Whatever record the arrangement has belongs to it and does not transfer to staff whose job, training and liability are teaching. [Rejecting P3] Shortening response time assumes the armed teacher is present, armed, and able to act under fire, and the premise prices in none of the countervailing risks: a weapon stored where children are, the chance of an armed civilian being misidentified by arriving officers, and the sustained firearms training teachers neither receive nor agreed to.