And this is the truth.

I’ve been doing some reading on Columbine, here are some additional things to think about in regards to the ‘if everyone had guns they’d be safe!’ idea:

-There WAS an armed security guard, a trained officer from the police force even, at Columbine. He exchanged shots with one of the gunmen. It didn’t change anything. Students were already dead by the time he engaged.

-The duty of teachers should not be to confront the danger but to get their students to safety.

-’Some people just want to watch the world burn’ is a true statement to school/mass shooters. In a recent WaPo article that looked at 150 mass shootings, starting from 1966 to 2018, out of the 153 gunmen(and 3 gunwomen) 88 died at the scene. That’s over half and suicide was a common cause. These aren’t people who are looking to survive their attacks. They are looking to deal damage and they don’t care if they die. For them, the threat of teachers being armed is not a deterrent.

To me when people say ‘arm the teachers!’ what they’re really saying is ‘minimize the damage’. They aren’t looking to stop or curtail shootings at all. They don’t understand and they don’t want to understand. But shootings like these aren’t going to go away, and ‘arming teachers’ is like trying to put a band aide on a gushing crack in a dam. The wrong tool for the wrong problem.