The media has had a feeding frenzy focusing on school shootings over the last several years, and this focus has generated a number of different proposed solutions to school shootings in order to keep kids safe.
One of the more controversial proposals out there is to either allow or to mandate teachers to get trained with a firearm and to carry on campus. Naturally, this causes sheer panic in many anti-gunners.
So, now that some school systems are allowing school teachers to carry on campus, is there any evidence that this is an effective method to protect our children? Well, we have an answer to that question (hat tip to here for the lead). In fact, John Lott gives us a summary of the information in the abstract of a paper that he wrote on this exact topic:
After the Columbine school shooting 20 years ago, one of the more significant changes in how we protect students has been the advance of legislation that allows teachers to carry guns at schools. There are two obvious questions: Does letting teachers carry create dangers? Might they deter attackers? Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work. 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. Fears of teachers carrying guns in terms of such problems as students obtaining teachers guns have not occurred at all, and there was only one accidental discharge outside of school hours with no one was really harmed. While there have not been any problems at schools with armed teachers, the number of people killed at other schools has increased significantly – doubling between 2001 and 2008 versus 2009 and 2018.
The data is clear: Armed teachers save students’ lives. You simply cannot contest what the data says. The only thing that you can do is choose whether you want to accept the reality that arming teachers works or whether you want to act like an anti-gunner and stick your head in the sand.
As for me, I’ll take arming teachers and keeping kids safe every time over the alternative.