More guns is never the answer

When the members of the Texas school board were drafting their ruling on gun control, I wonder if an animated paperclip pop-up on their Microsoft Word document batted its eyelashes and said: “You seem to be writing something that will cause a lot more chaos than it already has. Would you like some help?”

Actually, we could all use some help here. The school board in Harrold, Texas announced on Aug. 28 that it would allow teachers to carry concealed weapons to schools.

The New York Times reported that “students in this tiny town of grain silos and ranch-style houses spent much of the first couple of days in school this week trying to guess which of their teachers were carrying pistols under their clothes.” If this doesn’t sound like a problem to you yet, I’m not sure what will.

I understand that the idea behind this was great; to prevent another massacre along the lines of what happened at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, or more recently the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that killed 33 people.

However, my question is: Who is going to protect the students from the teachers? Carrying a gun makes someone a shooter and a potential killer, and as far as I know, teachers are trained to teach and not to kill.

Now, imagine you knew that your professor at Portland State was carrying a gun. Do you feel safe?

Perhaps, but I think most people would feel more safe if they were protecting themselves and the one with the right to carry the gun. Now, I’m not saying that it is a bad idea to protect people from potential school shootings, but according to the National Center for Law Enforcement Technology, statistics show that more police officers are killed with their own guns than illegal handguns on the street.

So, if a teacher feels so unsafe that they need to bring a firearm to school, they should also consider a career change, because if trained police officers are more likely to be killed with their own weapons, I see a teacher in an even more hazardous position, a position with a larger margin for error because they do not have the same training of handheld weapons that law enforcement has.

Protecting students from a school shooting seems to be the right thing to do, but having a teacher carrying a gun to school not only makes them a target but it also allows an easier opportunity for a student to obtain the weapon.

And if you know what happened at Columbine and Virginia Tech, you would know that both shootings were done by students who somehow obtained a gun, so having a teacher carry one to school seems counterintuitive to the goal of security.

I don’t know about you, but I feel extremely safe at Portland State without these concealed weapons in my professors pockets–and compared to a city the size of the Portland State campus, I can’t even imagine why on earth Harrold, Texas students and teachers would need guns to protect themselves from nothing but each other.