Encyclopedia of Opinion
Question
Should teachers carry guns?
Position1 of 2›
No, teachers should not carry guns
Argument‹4 of 5›

Teachers lack the tactical knowledge needed to handle weapons

Extensive training is needed to handle dangerous weapons such as guns. Placing a gun in an untrained teacher's hands is a liability and dangerous to the students.

The argument

Teachers have an array of degrees from academic institutions. They are experts in their respective fields. However, teachers are not considered experts in public safety, like police officers or security guards. The distinction matters because the skill at issue is not one that general competence supplies: handling a firearm in an emergency is a specific, trained capability, and expertise in mathematics or history has no bearing on it. The scale of that training shows how much is being asked. Law enforcement officials receive, on average, 840 hours of basic training with 168 hours being specifically for weapons, self-defense, and the use of force. Those hours cover far more than marksmanship: when to draw, when not to fire, and how to identify a threat among people who are not threats. No comparable preparation exists anywhere in a teacher's training. Even with this training, law enforcement officers are not immune to crumbling under pressure. An evaluation of the NYC Police Department’s firearm training found that an officer's shot accuracy significantly decreased when engaged on the ground. That is the important finding, because the deterioration is happening to people who have had the full 168 hours; the capability demonstrated on a range is not the capability available in a real encounter. This begs the question: how might a teacher’s already limited knowledge of ballistics fare, in a building full of children? Not only is lack of tactical knowledge an issue, but this policy opens teachers to criminal liability should they be in a shootout, and state immunity laws will not exempt schools from all legal liability. A teacher who fires and is wrong is left exposed to consequences the policy does not shield them from.

Premises

[P1]Teachers are experts in their academic fields but, unlike police officers or security guards, are not trained in public safety—law enforcement receives on average 840 hours of basic training, 168 of them on weapons and use of force. [P2] Even highly trained officers' shooting accuracy collapses under pressure, so an armed teacher's far more limited ballistics knowledge would be dangerous, and carrying weapons would expose teachers and schools to criminal liability in a shootout. [C] Because teachers lack the tactical knowledge to handle firearms safely, teachers should not carry guns.

Counter-arguments

In order to obtain a weapon, each state has certain regulations to be fulfilled. On top of these regulations, legislators and policymakers are mulling over the idea of adding training for educators.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The training comparison is doing less work than it appears, since it describes what police receive rather than what an armed teacher would be required to complete — and the proposals at issue generally attach a training requirement, so the premise argues against an unregulated version of the policy nobody is defending. [Rejecting P2] The accuracy finding concerns officers engaged in a struggle on the ground, which is not the situation a teacher in a locked classroom would face, so it is being generalised beyond its setting; and liability is a separate objection about who bears the cost of an error rather than evidence about tactical knowledge, which is what the title claims.