Citation

Anderson PC. J. Gend. Race Just. 2019; 21.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, University of Iowa College of Law)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

... As everyone who has been to public school knows, kids are often unruly, which in combination with guns in the classroom, will lead to a constantly dangerous situation. I remember that, as a kid, my friends and I would often mess around with the teacher's belongings as a joke, for instance, hiding a plastic croissant on the other side of the room and waiting for her to notice (it was French class). This is all in good fun, and such things are a common occurrence in a classroom environment that can often be tedious from the part of the students and, of course, you want to act out to impress your friends. However, it seems obvious that with school being in session for seven or eight hours every day, at some point, a teacher isn't going to be able to keep their gun entirely secure. Maybe they leave it behind in an unlocked drawer, or it falls onto the floor while the teacher is grading papers. It seems like an inevitability that some students will get their hands on it, and in those situations, fatal accidents would be sure to occur...

Additionally, classrooms can also be inherently tense environments. Teachers may be frustrated at students' refusal to listen or their systemically neglected paycheck, for instance, and students may be frustrated by the hierarchical social environment or by their grades in certain classes. Teenagers don't have fully developed brains and may not be able to gauge the seriousness and risks inherent in firearms. This psychological environment for both students and teachers may lead to a situation where tensions are very high, and the student reaches for the gun (which they know teachers carry) or the teacher brandishes or reaches for the gun out of frustration. It seems to me that inserting the ability to inflict deadly force into this high stress environment could create daily fatal potential for danger in hundreds of schools where there usually would not be such a danger. Combined with implicit racial bias present in people as a whole, it would likely also have the impact of exposing people of color to a hostile learning environment.

If arming teachers isn't the solution, what then? Although many would blame mental health, mental illness is present in only around 14-23% of all incidents of generalized mass murder.[3] However, as of January 17, 2018, 94 out of 96 of these mass shootings were committed by males, most of them white, despite the fact that women have depression at a higher rate than men do.[4] It's clear that instead of a mental health problem or a not-arming-teachers problem, we have a toxic white supremacist masculinity problem...

Availalble: https://jgrj.law.uiowa.edu/article/arming-teachers-not-solution

Language: en