While Maine is still coming to terms with the deadly mass shooting of last Tuesday, the Joint Standing Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs will this week hold a hearing on a number of “school safety” bills, including more than one that would arm school staff in our state.
Before zooming in to this reckless, frightening logic, let’s zoom out.
According to the Gun Violence Archive this past Friday morning, since the start of 2023, 533 American children under the age of 17 had died by guns. A further 1,286 had been injured. According to a Pew Research report released this month, gun deaths among America’s children increased by 50% between 2019 and 2021.
Last year marked the deadliest year in American schools since 1999.
In the galling, unacceptable absence of gun control legislation and tighter regulation of guns at both the state and federal levels – the only sure preventative measures – school districts have long taken it upon themselves to press ahead with defensive measures, investing billions of dollars in the name of school safety in recent years.
The public is by now painfully familiar with many of these ideas: elaborate locks and doors on classrooms, buzzer systems, metal detectors, security cameras, panic buttons and onerous rules about who can be on the school grounds and when. An increasing number of schools now require children to use see-through backpacks.
The most sad, aggressive and flawed of this category of supposed solutions is gun carrying by school employees.
More than 30 states now allow people to be armed on school grounds with the permission of the school. Republican lawmakers would like to add Maine to the list.
This editorial board is unequivocally opposed to permitting educators and others who work in schools to carry guns at school.
Repeated legislative failure is what brought us the fearful environment we are forced to live with today. It’s unconscionable that anybody would move to equip more people with more guns while studiously ignoring proposals for even the most basic checks on gun ownership such as background checks and waiting periods.
Despite many U.S. schools feeling more like fortresses, gun incidents are at a high. There is little evidence that any of the “deterrent” measures taken work, Marc Zimmerman, co-director of the National Center for School Safety at the University of Michigan, told the New York Times in January.
“If you press a panic button, it probably means somebody is already shooting or threatening to shoot. That is not prevention,” Zimmerman said. The same goes for a teacher needing to fire a gun. Debate over the effect these interventions have on students’ emotional well-being rages on.
Two of the bills up for consideration in Augusta on Wednesday use the word “enhance” to describe what armed people in schools and on school grounds can do for school safety and security.
These reactive proposals will do nothing of the sort. The people who know best seem to know that already – in a 2018 poll, a majority of American teachers said that they did not want the permission; just 18% expressed a willingness to carry a gun on the job.
True enhancement of safety and security at schools means taking meaningful, community-wide steps to protect teachers and other workers, not deputizing them as police officers.
It means resourcing schools and paying the people who work at them properly, so that school employees are not driven to quit and that schools have enough staff to be attentive and engaged on a daily basis. And it means taking clear steps toward gun control.
For an indication of just how much ad hoc enthusiasm there is for proposals to arm teachers right now, consider the existence of a “grassroots movement” offering free introductory training to teachers and others who work with young people on a single designated “national” day.
Volunteer instructors listed online offer everything from “three-hour introduction to pistol” to “marksmanship fundamentals.” The imprecision on display reveals this as the untrustworthy extension of the national gun-rights effort that it is.
That our schools need to be made safe and secure is in no doubt. The bottom line, though, is that the presence of guns makes us less safe. The obvious and best means of deterring gun violence is to ensure that there are fewer and less-lethal guns.
If we’re introducing guns to our schools, we’re introducing risk to our schools.
Once we do that, we’ve already lost.
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