There's nothing extraordinary about Tennessee's plan to arm teachers
Did you know that 32 states — not including Tennessee — have laws allowing teachers and staff to carry firearms in schools?
You should be forgiven if you didn’t know that — especially if you’ve been relying on Gannett (which owns most of Tennessee’s daily newspapers) for coverage of Republicans’ efforts to arm teachers in the Volunteer State.
As Gannett reporters have reported on the General Assembly’s consideration of a bill allowing qualified teachers to go armed in schools — legislation that passed along party-line votes this week and will soon be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee — the fact that Tennessee will become the 33rd state in the union to have such a law on the books has been largely glossed over. News coverage has centered on emotional pleas from the families of Covenant School victims urging legislators to vote down the bill, and for Lee to veto the bill, accompanied by photos of angry demonstrators holding up signs in the gallery. You get the impression that Tennessee’s attempt to allow teachers to go armed is a novel idea. Vice President Kamala Harris, upon learning of the bill’s passage this week, took to Twitter to call Tennessee’s GOP lawmakers “extremists.”
In fact, considering the number of states that beat Tennessee to the draw on the issue (pardon the pun), the action taken this week by Volunteer State lawmakers is much closer to the norma than it is to extremism.
Of course, the fact that most states have laws allowing teachers to carry guns (33 will, once Lee signs the bill, and only 17 do not) does not, in and of itself, justify Tennessee’s new legislation. As the old saying goes, “Sometimes a majority just means all the fools are on the same side.”
But the legislation deserves an honest debate, not one centered on emotionalism or sensationalism or half-truths.
The reason so many states have passed laws similar to Tennessee’s — which would require 40 hours of training by teachers wishing to carry, in addition to a handgun carry permit, as well as background checks and approval by the top administrators at the school, the school system, and the local law enforcement agency — is because once the emotionalism is swept aside, the idea of a teacher carrying a concealed handgun isn’t really that far-fetched.
So-called “gun free zones” simply do not work. Signs have been placed at bank entrances for years proclaiming guns barred inside those institutions. Yet, never in the history of banking has there been a bank robber who saw those signs, stopped, snapped his fingers in frustration, and turned to walk away because he didn’t want to break the law.
The argument for guns in schools isn’t quite that simple, obviously. There isn’t much we — as a society — can do to keep guns out of banks or most other businesses, yet we go to great lengths to keep guns out of schools, including but not limited to locked entrances that limit entry of unauthorized persons and, in some schools, metal detectors. The argument could be made that allowing teachers — who walk through those locked entrances and bypass the metal detectors — to carry would allow guns into school where they could potentially fall into the wrong hands (which is precisely why it’s important that Tennessee’s new law included a stipulation that the public not be notified about which teachers are carrying).
Still, the adage that good people with guns stop bad people with guns holds a lot of truth. If the only thing better than one SRO in school is two (or more) SROs in school, would an SRO and multiple armed teachers in a school also be a good thing? It’s a subject worth debating, and a lot of states are having that debate.
Teachers going armed isn’t a new concept. I’m reminded of the story of an old educator in Scott County many years ago who was dealing with threats of violence from older students who were ruffians. As the story goes, he walked into class one morning, placed a handgun of hickory switches by one hand and a pistol by his other hand, and said: “okay, now, whichever one of you thinks you can take me, come get me.”
That this nation long went without laws barring guns from school yet mass shootings in school are a relatively new phenomenon suggests that this issue isn’t nearly as shallow as a lot of the debate that surrounds it.
It’s frequently said that teachers don’t get paid enough to police schools in addition to all their other responsibilities. No truer words … yet, it’s important to distinguish that the new law in Tennessee, as in other states, doesn’t require teachers to go armed and police their school. Rather, it provides a mechanism for trained teachers to defend themselves and their students if they want to. I don’t get paid enough to police Walmart, but if I had been inside the El Paso Walmart on Aug. 3, 2019, when a racist gunman killed 23 people and injured 22 others, I would’ve certainly been thankful to have had a concealed handgun on my person and wouldn’t have hesitated to use it if given the opportunity to protect innocent shoppers and myself from a madman intent on killing as many innocent people as he could.
None of that is the point I set out to make, however. Despite any argument that I appear to make to the contrary, I see both sides of the debate and I could be persuaded that arming teachers is either a good thing or a bad thing. I also don’t think that arming teachers is a suitable alternative to SROs or other school security measures. My point is the politicians and journalists who are portraying Tennessee’s lawmakers as extremists who are taking extraordinary measures to — as one Gannett article put it this week — “increase access to firearms.” That’s simply disingenuous. As indicated by the growing number of states with laws on the books allowing teachers to go armed, the steps taken by Tennessee’s lawmakers are … well, rather ordinary.