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Matthew Plath

Ms. Wilden

ENGL 120

10/27/2021

Guns in School: How and Why Armed Teachers Keep Schools Safe

I am a firm believer that guns are a necessity for our country. They are tools that are used

for a purpose. If you are a hunter, the purpose of the firearm would be for hunting. If you were

buying a gun for home-defense, the purpose of it would be for home defense. Same thing for

concealed carry. Within the past couple of years, there has been controversy surrounding the

topic of concealed carry because people feel as if it is a danger to society. Especially with school

shootings.

We have been trying to find a way to keep the schools safer. At my high school, we

always had an armed officer in the school during scheduled school days. This helps keep schools

safer, but it is not very cost effective. Keeping an officer in one place throughout the day is not

cheap. To help schools save money, teachers should be able to enroll in a program where they

can either concealed carry or keep a firearm in the room. Teachers should have the opportunity

to keep a firearm in the classroom or on their person.

It has been proven that schools become safer when there is someone armed in the school.

John R. Lott expands on this idea: “There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded

or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6 AM and midnight at a

school that lets teachers carry guns.” (Lott) He previously states that as of 2019, twenty states

allow teachers and staff to carry guns on school property. To further show that this is a fact, he

made a table to show the statistics for each shooting (see fig. 1).
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Figure 1: Total number of people killed on campus including perpetrator

by year, excluding attacks between Midnight and 6 AM and suicides
45

40

35

30

25
Deaths

20

15

10

2000
5 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
0

This table from John R. Lott shows that the general trend in school shootings has been

slowly increasing since 2000. He says this after the table, “Over 19 years we have studied, those

rates are zero for schools that allow teachers to carry and obviously not zero for all the other

schools. With an average of 58 million school-age students from 5 to 18 years old per year

during the period that we studied, the average rate of death or injury from a shooting is 0.039 per

100,000 students across all schools (so the rate is even higher among schools that don’t allow

teachers to carry), while it is 0 per 100,000 in schools with armed teachers.” (Lott, SSRN.com).

Over the course of 19 years, it is clear that when teachers are armed, it creates a safer

environment.
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It does not affect what people would think, however. Others think that when people have

access to guns, like teachers and staff, they will use it irresponsibly. Another school of thought is

people think that they just need to implement more laws. Lott’s book published in 2010 explains

this scenario perfectly, “Yet, just because a law is passed to ban guns, it does not automatically

follow that the total number of deaths will decline.” (Lott, 10-11). It just does not work, but that

is their opinion and that is their right. Andrew J. Baranauskas gave his opinion on what he thinks

the government should do when it comes to guns in schools. He gave his opinion in an article

called “Public Opinion on Support for Arming Teachers with Guns in the United States”. In this,

he also uses data to help him form his opinion on this issue. In 2018, ANES asked parents if they

favored, opposed, or neither favored nor opposed allowing teachers to carry guns at school. The
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response was very eye-opening for me (see fig. 2).

Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose allowing school

teachers to carry guns at school?

Highly Opposed Somewhat Opposed Opposed Little Neutral

Favored Little Somewhat Favored Highly Favored

From a sample size of 2500 people, over a quarter disapproved of teachers being allowed

to carry firearms on school property. The people that voted for this were liberals and the 16.6%

of people that highly favored this were conservative. Not only this, but Lott also created his own

survey surrounding this topic. He surveyed a 450,000-member private organization of police

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officers. “Shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, PoliceOne, a

450,000-member private organization of police (380,000 active, full-time and 70,000 retired

officers), surveyed its members and found that 77 percent supported arming teachers and/or

school staff (PoliceOne.com, 2013). Eighty-six percent of the officers believed that casualties in

mass public shootings would be reduced or altogether prevented if legally-armed citizens had

been able to carry guns.” (Lott, NewPrariePress.org). Knowing that officers have experience

with firearms and know their gun rights, we can build the correct opinion that guns should be

allowed on school property.

But there obviously must be other rule in play. I believe that teachers and staff must have

something concealed, like a handgun. For example, they should not be allowed to have a rifle or

shotgun in their classroom. Lacey Wallace wrote a book surrounding this issue with guns in

schools and she says this: “According to these sources, 6,911 juveniles ages 18 and younger

were injured by firearms in 2015, a rate of 9.38 per 100,000 juveniles in this age group. Nearly a

quarter of these cases were unintentional injuries; most were cause by the juvenile playing with

the gun.” (Wallace). There are obviously some rules that must be in place. I think that the teacher

will have to get their concealed carry license, take a course with the police on how to handle

mass shooting situations and have to register the firearm through the school and/or district and

through the police station.

Knowing that those stats exist, we have to think differently about our security without

teachers being armed. Nothing will stop a shooter that wants to do this act. Lott expands on this:

“Schools having multiple entrances to facilitate easy evacuations in case of fires or other

emergencies…. and making everyone pass through a metal detector can create crowded

bottlenecks of people that present easy targets to attackers. Metal detectors won’t stop someone
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from shooting their way into a school.” (Lott, NewPrairiePress.org). That only further proves

that teachers and staff should push to be able to arm themselves on school property.

Another rule about this is that teachers will need to keep it concealed or somewhere safe

so that students don’t get to it. The thought would then come and say that the firearm could

discharge randomly and hurt or kill a student. That just isn’t possible. The firearm would have to

have some sort of force acting on the trigger or firing pin in order for a round to be extracted. To

further push this fact out, Lott found a statistic on firearm deaths relating to children that he used

in his book that was published in 2010. He says this on page 10 in his book: “For instance,

children are much less likely to be accidentally killed by guns (particularly handguns) than most

people think. Consider the following numbers: In 2006 there were a total of 642 accidental

firearm deaths in the entire country.” (Lott, 10). This is evidently clear when it’s compared to

other deaths. He also says this, “Almost three times as many children drown in bathtubs each

year than die from all types of firearm accidents.” (Lott, 10).

That also shows that a random firearm discharge in a school is way less likely than

having something else happen. Don’t get me wrong, hearing any child’s death is very tragic

especially if you’re related to the child’s family in some way. Even more so if the death occurs at

the child’s school because of a school shooter. That is why I think that teachers and staff should

have the option to be armed on school property. To prevent mass shootings from happening, like

the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. These are scenarios that could have been easily avoided

if a staff member or a teacher was armed with a handgun and able to help stop the perpetrator.

But unfortunately, not a lot of people have figured out that firearms are always given a purpose,

whether it is for self-defense, like in this case, or hunting, or home defense. If there were a
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petition written to have this happen, I would be the first person to sign this. I hope that others

would too.
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Works Cited

Lott, John R. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws. University

of Chicago Press, 2020.

Lott, John R. “Schools That Allow Teachers to Carry Guns Are Extremely Safe: Data on the

Rate of Shootings and Accidents in Schools That Allow Teachers to Carry.” SSRN, 29 May

2019, https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?

ID=8790691230850141250850700861220000890020480190330510751020641020040030

6710502510209601910001811506011311102209700006711509800812109008600102300

0097087003115024032048023126097075102006119110089117114089065065126067079

023096079110124084004094094102&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE.

Lott, John; "Total number of people killed on campus including perpetrator by year, excluding

attacks between Midnight and 6 AM and suicides”; Papers.SSRN.com, 29 May 2019,

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?

ID=3070220731011120640860221110970830680530920850930220621131050920810271

2300906709111902912102711812209701007500207308909000300200802207406201700

3085003071018107069058051107006122075089069127069000118085023074093031007

100071004092104092124003106117&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE

Baranauskas, Andrew J. “Public Opinion on Support for Arming Teachers with Guns in the

United States.” Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis Online, 29 Nov. 2020,

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2020.1849360?

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Rgm40ZZqnwT-Su.
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Lott, John R. “Health Behavior Research - Newprairiepress.org.” New Prairie Press, Dec. 2018,

https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=hbr.

Wallace, Lacey N. “Guns in School: Juveniles and Teachers.” IGI Global, https://www.igi-

global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=214243&ptid=198505&t=guns+in+school

%3a+juveniles+and+teachers.

Baranauskas, Andrew J. "Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose allowing school

teachers to carry guns at school?"; TandOfOnline.com, 09 Jan 2020,

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2020.1849360?

casa_token=2GyNWzjDWScAAAAA

%3A9TRoh1yUMVhM3DtjYcfDZg3dAlDtSCkIituRAdHRpbg86HrRoYSd51uY_WDROj

Rgm40ZZqnwT-Su