I tend to be agnostic on the whole “argh, guns everywhere! We’re all going to die!” argument, which I know makes me a bad liberal, but there it is. I am not worried about y’all having guns in restaurants or parks. Maybe the gun nuts have worn me down or just convinced me, I don’t know. But that’s the truth. I do not care. Go forth, be careful, and for gods’ sake, don’t shoot any innocent people.
And my mother is a teacher and I have many cousins who are teachers and, well, that’s my mom. Of course I believe she can do no wrong. And that she would always act appropriately and rationally. I want to say what I’m going to say without offending the teachers among us. Please, bear with me.
But I have been to public schools, exclusively, growing up.
And I have to report that this idea of letting adults who work in schools carry guns is quite possibly the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas I have heard Republican legislators float this year. Other than the police who work at the school, the only people I would even remotely consider arming would be the school nurse and the school secretary. In any school I’ve attended, these seem to be the most level-headed un-involved in the drama people in the school. In other words, they are the folks you might count on to not use a weapon to make their lives easier.
But other folks? I had an English teacher who, in order to establish what a bully she was, taped the Man from GM into his desk and then taped his mouth shut. Granted, he was annoying, but damn. I have no doubt she would have pulled out her gun in class to make sure we all knew she had it. There were coaches in my schools who pressured kids to have sex with them, who I’m sure would have backed up their threats of “Everyone will think you’re a slut” with “It’d be a terrible shame if there was an accident.” I can imagine one teacher who spent a whole semester pissing and moaning about giant government conspiracies against him and I don’t think he would have had any problem pulling out his gun and showing us all how to “protect ourselves” from the Feds.
And I know about guns at school. I grew up at a time when kids came late to school because it was hunting season and had their rifles sitting in their gun racks in their trucks right out in the parking lot. And no one ever was afraid. But I would have been afraid to know that some of the lunatics who had power over me and were unsupervised with me most of the day had weapons.
Really, what a terrible idea.
And let’s not even consider how easy it would be for a determined nutjob student to get his hands on a gun in the classroom.
Filed under: The State of Tennessee
[...] Cat Pants » Okay, Now. There’s Gun-nuttiness and then there’s ‘Lost Your Damn Mind.’Posted 96 minutes [...]
Just recalling some of the sadists posed as schoolteachers that I had in early childhood, thanks to this post. Well, and administrators. The ones with cricket bats that they drilled holes through, and called them “The Board of Education.”
Yeah, this is a bad idea among bad ideas.
WTF is it with the guns legislation? Is TN now the designated lab for every germ of an idea that the NRA ever countenanced? (And I can see how this works from a lobbying perspective — “Hey, they do it this way in Tennessee. Why not here?”)
Like I said, I’m not that concerned about most of the gun legislation that’s passed this session (and I know that makes me an outlier among lefties), but this seems very different. If a bunch of folks in Applebee’s have guns or are sympathetic to folks who have guns and someone does pull his gun and start misbehaving, I would expect that other folks would be all “Okay, wait a minute, let’s all calm down here.”
But in a school, where one adult is basically unsupervised? Frankly, I don’t want one person with a lot of power to have a gun when no one else in the room can.
That seems to me to be a recipe for disaster and almost exactly the kind of situation that, in any other case, gun nuts would be upset about.
[...] B. is none too keen on allowing those with carry permits who work at schools to carry there. She doesn’t trust teachers but the school police officers she has no issue with. An issue to [...]
what makes those cops so magically special?
who’s considering arming anybody else? every proposal i’ve seen involves allowing adults who can pass the checks to arm themselves.
and, y’know, if adults who work in schools are all such incorrigible bullies that we can’t trust any of them to pass the background checks and act responsibly with weaponry, maybe we should rethink this trusting them around children idea, first off?
(yeah, my high school experience was pretty shitty, too. mostly because of the other kids, partly because the adults were clueless. but in no small part, i’ll have to admit, because i was a kid myself, and my remembered experiences of that era can’t be trusted to be particularly objective or fair; i’m sure i was a selfish asshole like every other high school-aged kid. that’s surely part of why i remember it being as shitty as i do, i can’t just take all those experiences for granted as being obviously truthful.
mind you, i still won’t stop hating all those assholes — my own age, and older — in those memories of mine. it’s just that i can’t necessarily trust my basis for hating them without some question.)
When I was in high school the only people who were armed were the students. Not only do I think that teachers should be allowed to carry weapons in schools, I also think they should be allowed to use violence against students in self-defense.
As it presently stands, any student (or group of students) can mercilessly beat any member of a school’s faculty and that faculty member cannot defend themselves in any way, shape, or form. You basically have to cover up your face and try to get away, that’s about all you can do without losing your job permanently.
There is presently no situation where a faculty member can strike a student, and the students in some Memphis schools exploit this fact in order to terrorize their teachers.
Oh, and B, don’t worry too much about being an outlier on this issue. People are too hung up on the “ZOMG DRUNKS WITH GUNS” idea to think about this rationally. The truth is that Tennessee just became the 38th state to allow guns in bars, and it’s a safe bet that none of the people who are up in arms over this ever thought twice about going out drinking practically anywhere else in the country.
Of the states that border Tennessee, only North Carolina prohibits guns in bars. I know liberals who go drinking in Mississippi every weekend and they never once expressed any concern about the fact that it has always been legal to carry weapons into bars there. This is really a non-issue and all the controversy is eventually going to die down and go away.
mind you, i still won’t stop hating all those assholes — my own age, and older — in those memories of mine. it’s just that i can’t necessarily trust my basis for hating them without some question.)
Okay, so ask a teacher.
Here, I’ll volunteer. Some adults who work and teach in public schools are assholes.
Why do we entrust our children to them?
Well, sometimes there’s not much choice.
I no longer teach in public schools. When I did, I don’t think I would have considered arming myself. (Growing up around guns didn’t really make me comfortable around them.) But my colleagues? The same ones who wouldn’t hestitate to throw a student on the ground or pull them out of their seat by an ear? Guns would have definitely helped them make their point, whatever that was.
This was a pretty rough school, and physical punishment was de rigeur. And it worked, kind of… for a function of “work” that does not include fostering a productive and safe learning environment. I can’t see where guns would especially help or make teachers safer, but I’m thinking that in some hands guns would deterioate whatever faith remains in “school” as a learning place.
Wait, what? I keep trying to think of a scenario where having armed teachers makes things better, and kind of failing. Even if the teacher is an awesome shot and carries their firearm on their person at all times, they’re always going to be put in the position of reacting to someone with the element of surprise in a situation with a lot of innocent, scared, uncooperative
bystandersobstacles.Aaand, I’ve lost my train of thought. Class started, heh.
Well, for one, generally if a resource officer is called to a scene there’s at least one other adult present.
thing is though, the absolutely shitty situations i’m seeing described here — by you and B. both, just for two — don’t seem to leave any room left for such faith anyway.
certainly not in the minds of the kids, at any rate. and seeing as how they’re the ones supposed to be doing the learning, once you’ve got them convinced that’s not gonna happen, it no longer matters who else might be keeping the faith.
so it seems to me like banning guns from the hands of such teachers, then, would be purely cosmetic — a band-aid on a sucking chest wound, to stick to the blood-in-the-streets metaphor. if you really have no other choice but to leave such sadistic bullies alone with classrooms full of kids, keeping guns out of their hands really won’t magically fix your school system. the kids will still end up cynical and jaded, and will still be convinced that learning is clearly not what they’re going to school for. and they’ll be right.
(nickname with a number: trying to get through the spam filter, even though it clearly hates me. watch the number to see how many times i had to try.)
The temper factor is what scares me about this. Teenage attitude is perhaps the most annoying thing on the planet. It’s intended to get under your skin and push your buttons.
That is such a sad statement about our public school teachers, that they have such glaring personality disorders that we can’t trust them to not abuse power. I won’t get into why I think we have such persons in our schools, but I will say that the very small, rural school I went to only had one staff/faculty bully that I ever encountered, and that was the Principal. We may not have had the best school with the best resources, but we had teachers who remembered teaching our parents, and who knew our parents, which meant the parents knew the teachers outside of the classroom. An abusive teacher would not last long.
[...] a part of me that agrees with Aunt B.: I am not worried about y’all having guns in restaurants or parks. Maybe the gun nuts have worn [...]
if you really have no other choice but to leave such sadistic bullies alone with classrooms full of kids, keeping guns out of their hands really won’t magically fix your school system. the kids will still end up cynical and jaded, and will still be convinced that learning is clearly not what they’re going to school for. and they’ll be right.
Flip that, though. We’re not faced with the question of whether keeping guns out of the hands of teachers will improve things. Improving things is a whole other kettle of fish. We’re faced with the question of whether allowing guns in the hands of teachers will improve things. My argument is that it would not, and B’s argument (which I find pretty compelling) is that guns would create more danger for both teachers and students.
B already described some scary power imbalances, so I’m going to revisit the idea of “faith,” again… even though I know that it’s a weird word. In my former school, where the physical intervention “worked,” it worked in this way: the students were more or less immersed in a culture of violence, and some of them needed or wanted to see violence as authority. Not all, obviously – but whenever we’re talking about disruptive or violent students we’re only ever talking about a few, even in a school like that one. So this handful of students would act out, and occasionally the hands-on teacher would need to intervene, and the acting-out students would get roughed up a bit and they’d calm down and I think they were even relieved in a way, because they were used to it, or respected it, or who knows… I don’t condone this, but I could see how it has its own logic.
But suppose the teacher who would break up fights by wrestling down a student instead broke it up by waving or firing a gun? Or if the ear-pinching teacher instead just polished her gun for students to see? That’s not the same. That’s saying that either you are faking it or you are willing to kill or maim students to keep order or punish (teenagers tend not to think about the teachers’ need for self-defense; they’re still in a kind of egocentric brain stage where everything is about or against them). The predictability and familiarity of the physical interventions that “worked” would go out the window – you’d get fresh kinds of anger or fear or panic with a gun. And anger and fear and panic all incite more violence.
Obviously, all any of us can do is speculate. So that’s my speculation.
I agree with the points everyone has made about unhinged teachers and abuses of power.
I think, though, that the push for this comes from the same place that the Gun! In Restaurants bill comes from.
There are places where law-abiding people are in real danger. They are being stalked; they’ve been threatened, etc. Yet since they are law-abiding they cannot have their guns on their person. The people who stalk them, threaten them and terrorize them have no compunction about following the law. So that means that we are actually creating a situation where someone has forced vulnerability that can be exploited.
Gun Carry Parity is essential to anyone who believes in the bill of rights. Because for every unhinged social studies teacher who tapes kids to the desk there is a woman who is being stalked by an exhusband but can’t keep her gun with her at work.
To me it just makes more sense to trust people who haven’t committed a crime intead of making the lives of criminals easier.
As much as I sympathize with this, I’m still just vaguely … confused. It seems like allowing guns on campus makes everyone less safe. The innocent defender is always just that – on the defense. The assailant has the advantage, and in scenarios like the one above, they have such an enormous advantage that it seems like the gun wouldn’t help.
I’m sure someone else can come up with situations in which it would help, or turn the tide, but … hm, I guess what I’m really reacting to is my own discomfort with the ‘you’re scared so get a gun’ framework as it is currently in place. Although people are encouraged to learn to use and care for their guns, obviously, there’s nothing in place to ensure that people who get their hands on guns are actually any good with them. And the people who get them out of fear, especially of the sort where they’re looking to use them as deterrents (like, say, the classroom situation and so on) seem especially likely to … no, that’s not exactly right either. It’s not whether they’re likely to not learn how to use them (which there does seem to be evidence for, but which I’m not in a position to research closely), it’s that a person who can’t use a gun (but has one) in a situation almost guaranteed to involve a large number of kids and bystanders in the way seems like a recipe for disaster-by-heroism.
Aaand my next class has started, so. Back to work.
I still fall on the side of individual liberty here. We can all hypothesize about subsequent hypotheticals stemming from initial hypotheticals. Unfortunately our constitution is written that way. It guarantees liberties and trusts us enough to use those liberties in the pursuit of happiness.
I wonder, though, whether the presumption that “it’s a shitty fallen world and everyone in it is in competition for the scarce resources that by rights belong to me” leads libertarians to a paranoid pessimistic race to the bottom. Haven’t we — and I mean the we that we create by the paying of taxes into a commonly financed enterprise like a public school that exists for the benefit of the commonweal — also created some common duties and interests in these spaces owned and operated by the public that make them different than a privately owned business (bar) or domestic space (home)?
“To me it just makes more sense to trust people who haven’t committed a crime intead of making the lives of criminals easier.”
This is the most sane comment I have seen about this question so far. We trust these people with our children. If we can’t trust them that far, then they should be removed from their jobs, period.
magniloquence
“The assailant has the advantage, and in scenarios like the one above, they have such an enormous advantage that it seems like the gun wouldn’t help. ”
Step outside of the classroom for this. An assailant only has the advantage over an armed (and willing to use it) person if the assailant is aware that their target will be fighting back. If an attacker knows his victim will fight, he has to be prepared for it. I’m reminded of a case in FL where a man sat in his living room loading rounds into his revolver and announcing to the household that each round was for a specific person. By the time he finished loading, his wife had gotten her gun and shot him first. This guy knew there was another gun in the house, knew she knew where it was and how to get to it, yet was confident in the fact that his wife was either unable or unwilling to fight back.
Ask dolphin how much the willingness to fight back is a factor in a violent confrontation.
With regard to the classroom, what no one has suggested is this, “How reasonable would it be if the School Board (like the one in Harrold, TX) required that teachers who choose to carry take special training and only use frangible rounds (rounds that don’t ricochet or over-penetrate). Hell, I use frangible rounds in my carry gun so as to minimize striking an innocent. The training might spot problem teachers so administrators could deal with them.
I do agree that weapon retention is an issue. A gun in a holster that can be worked so easily that a kid could get the gun out of the holster easily is not safe. Teachers would need retention holsters.
I don’t have any bright ideas on how to deal with power abusive teachers, other than to treat them as we do power abusive cops.
Honestly, I’d love to. But if we removed everyone who wasn’t fit to teach, I’m not sure we’d have all that many teachers – at least not in the schools I attended or worked in.
Then again, I’m a) cynical and b) really out of it.
… it occurs to me that I probably haven’t been terribly clear. The fact that there are horrible teachers who shouldn’t be allowed near kids or in any position of power (telling little girls they’re evil whores who will go to hell? locking the autistic kid in the closet? disrecommending a student to colleges after promising wonderful things because they didn’t want to go out to lunch one day? I’ve seen all of ‘em, and that’s just what comes to mind with half a moment’s thought.) isn’t actually why I’m leery of the bill.
I’m leery of the bill for structural reasons regarding the state of firearms regulation (not to be confused with “gun control” in the current colloquial usage, but rather “the set of regulations regarding the sale and use of firearms”) and the conditions in which this bill would become relevant. I don’t know whether I’m leery enough to make a fuss over it – I don’t like it, but … *shrugs* I can’t think straight enough to get passionate about my dislike either.
My objection to the “but we trust these people with our kids!” is simply that it’s not a very good argument – both in shape and substance.
I don’t have any bright ideas on how to deal with power abusive teachers, other than to treat them as we do power abusive cops.
… let them go, hide behind the thin blue line, and get away with all sorts of shit? (I thought of making each word/phrase a separate link, but I think eight cases in one is enough to make my point)
(Not that this happens in all cases, of course, but often enough and severely enough that it’s not at all a comforting suggestion.)
I still don’t like it. To me, there’s just such a long distance between “how grown-ups behave among other grown-ups” and “letting a person in authority arm him or herself when no one else can be” that I just cannot support this. It doesn’t matter if people are under the impression that “all” kids are armed. They’re not. And it doesn’t matter to me if kids in Memphis can beat up on teachers and if the teachers fight back, they get fired, because if the teachers shot the students, they’d be getting more than fired.
A person left alone in authority over unarmed children all day should not be armed.
And we’re all talking high school kids here, but this suggestion doesn’t seem to limit guns to high school teachers. That’s just what we’ve been arguing. Under this proposal, a kindergarten teacher could have a gun in class.
I don’t like it.
I have no idea what this comment is supposed to mean, but can we leave me out of it unless I’m actively involved in the discussion. thanks.
I wondered about that line too.
Dolphin has expressed to me in the pas that he is an experienced martial artist (Kung-Fu, I believe). One of the things I’ve been taught in the dojos I’ve participated in was that all the technical knowledge of a fighting style is useless if the practitioner is without the will to use it.
He’s done that here? If so, I don’t remember it. If not, please remember that we all don’t follow each other all over the internet, so, if you don’t provide context for your comments, you sound a little weird.
I’m definitely in the camp of not wanting guns in schools. Because, really: guns are the tool of last resort. And if you’re a teacher, in a situation where you believe you need a tool of last resort, the only possible thing to keep those kids in line? You’ve already lost.
Could be that was a discussion that started here and continued elsewhere. If so, I apologize if I seemed out in left field.
what if you’re a teacher and you’re right about being in just such a situation?
how do last resorts ever improve by banning the very tool best suited to resolve them?
(and no, “keeping the kids in line” is not what anybody’s talking about here. “school shooter” is more what’s on people’s minds. teachers willing to resort to violence just to keep the kids “in line” shouldn’t be teachers, we all agree on that — i hope, anyway.)
Nomen, yeah, I do think folks are worried about school shooters, which is why I’m not opposed to having armed police officers and even some armed staff members. But the reality is that you are much more likely, as a teacher, to be faced with kids who are just assholes who drive you crazy than you are school shooters.
Japanese Jiu-Jitsu actually.
Still not sure I totally understand the relevance with your point. I mean, yes I think it’s common sense (martial art or not) that if you don’t fight back then you… …don’t fight back. But your particular example, it seems that having a gun doesn’t necessarily indicate a willingness to fight back and therefore doesn’t give the assailant an advantage (according to your logic, which I disagree with). Which is in direct conflict with the more common line of “if everybody had guns nobody would commit crimes because they’d be scared of getting shot” that we usually here.
I’m very ambivalent about gun issues in general though. Which is why I generally stay out of the disputes (except when I hear people claiming guns are the ONLY way to solve their problems because frankly that scares me).
WHAT?!
Japanese Jiu-Jitsu? Yeah, no that was never mentioned here, because I would have remembered that. Usually it’s Casey I can count on to spit out the randomly interesting bits of information.
Did you know that male platypi have venomous stingers on the inside of their hind legs?