A Gun for Every Teacher, We Call Nuts on that Solution!
We call nuts on the notion that arming teachers with a concealed gun in the classroom as a solution to gun violence in our schools. President Trump seemed to champion this idea during a listening session with victims of school gun violence at the White House yesterday.
My 89 year old mother taught 35 years in the public school system in Georgia, albeit long before Columbine, but I can not imagine this sweet lady packing a concealed gun, as she taught her students.
I have taught school too. Both fourth grade and on the college level. I doubt if any of my students would have been happy to know that Mr. Harvey was packing on a morning they came to school trying to explain how the dog came to eat their homework assignment.
Nuts!
Why should a teacher who is responsible for developing a lesson plan to impart knowledge to kids, also, be charged with protecting them from an outlaw bent on harming students and school personnel?
Simply nuts!
These are two incongruous ideas; any fourth grader can tell you that.
To suggest the best line of defense against gun violence in our schools is a conceal carry law for teachers is to display how inept we have become in protecting our schools from violence.
Responsibility for the protection of the school lies with local authorities. The job of the teacher is to teach, it is not to be a school policeman or paratrooper skilled in stopping mad people with guns who think killing children at school is a cool idea.
Nuts time squared!
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist. He is a Contributor at The Hill, SCLC National Magazine, Southern Changes Magazine and Black College Nines. He can be contacted at [email protected]
Now we know why so many are leaving the profession. This is insane. Thanks for writing about this Michael, because I cannot. I lost a family member to gun violence via a young man with a history of mental illness and attempted suicides who simply went to a county where there was no waiting period and bought a gun. He killed his 25-year-old former fiance (my cousin) and then himself on a sunny tree-lined street in Southwest Atlanta. Rev. Joseph Lowery preached both funerals on the same day and I never saw Lowery more broken than that day, so I am raw when it comes to this subject. My late cousin was, of all things, a teacher. She was killed in 1990 at the age of 25. Good writing.
Joy, thanks for the compliment. Hopefully, the nation can come up with others means to stop this incessant gun violence running rapid throughout our society.