Nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong with this

[smurasaki]

From my internet provider's homepage (where I first saw it).

ABC News

A school district in Texas has decided to allow teachers to carry concealed guns in school.  Sure, they have to be licensed to carry a concealed weapon in Texas, and the school district does have the wisdom to also require them to have "training in crisis management and hostile

Comments

[nenena]

That and an overreaction to a new problem that isn't new and isn't that much of a problem.

To be fair, when I worked at a certain high school in Minneapolis, we frequently caught students bringing weapons to school. Frequently as in once or twice per month, which is shockingly a lot.

I completely agree with everything in your post - and I think that arming teachers is a spectacularly bad idea - but. There are schools that are very chaotic and unsafe. I think it's important not to downplay the existence of violence in the schools where it is a very real problem.

I think the problem is that, too a lot of people, "violence in schools" invoke images of Columbine, or a hypothetical attack by an evil outsider. It's kind of a white privileged conception of "school violence," if that makes any sense. There tends to be this fear of some sort of "mass" attack, something that the teachers would somehow be in a position to fend against. Whereas in reality it's much more likely that violence is going to be student-on-student and focused on a single victim (i.e. Lawrence King). And you're absolutely right, arming teachers when students are the source of potential violence is a jaw-droppingly bad idea.

[smurasaki]

Yeah, that individual kind of violence (which isn't new, either) is a genuine problem, and, of course, there are schools with larger problems like gangs or just...bad groups of kids. The thing is, I don't think that is very well addressed by the usual measures, either. I don't know what you do with schools that have a large scale problem with violence or potential violence, but I have this horrible feeling that metal detectors and security guards just push that violence off campus, which may or may not spare the innocent bystander types, but which certainly doesn't spare the involved.

And most schools where it isn't a large scale problem have this horrible habit of ignoring the "minor" problems until someone does bring a gun to school. A lot of the student-on-student violence that gets reported seems to be the escalation of harassment, not some sudden event with nothing leading up to it. A lot of that school violence could probably be fixed by working to change the climate of schools, which desperately needs to be changed anyway, unless we really are trying to socialize our school kids for prison (God, I hope not.).