Jul 5, 2017 3 min read

It’s summertime, so imagine you’re planning a vacation and the country you’re thinking of traveling to has a lot going for it – opportunities for outdoor adventures, if that’s what captures your fancy, museums, shopping, bustling cities, bucolic countrysides, you name it.

There’s one catch, though – everyone walks around armed, like the denizens of lawless towns in old Westerns. You would probably think that, wow, a place like that must be pretty tense and unstable, like some kind of anarchic banana republic, and decide to spend your tourist dollars elsewhere.

But that’s the United States that some people envision – a place where everyone is packing heat, where everyone is in a state of heightened alert no matter where they are or what they are doing, because a mass-shooter or terrorist could be lurking just around any corner. This sort of fear-mongering has become the primary business of the National Rifle Association, and now some lawmakers want to take this misguided idea into our schools.

By a 28-22 vote last week, the Pennsylvania Senate approved a measure that would allow teachers, administrators and other employees to bring their guns with them to school. They would have to be trained to use the weapons and undergo the same type of psychological evaluations that are applied to police and other law-enforcement officers. Six Republicans sensibly dissented, but Camera Bartolotta and Guy Reschenthaler, senators from our region, were not among them.

The odds this will become law anytime soon are, thankfully, pretty small, because Gov. Tom Wolf has said he would veto the measure. Other opponents include a range of school safety experts and the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the teachers union, whose president, Jerry Oleksiak, explained teachers “are not trained law enforcement officers – their job is to educate children and act as role models.”

Exactly. Even if a teacher has been through a gun-training regimen, they still would lack the sort of know-how that police and other law-enforcement officials have to respond to dangerous situations that arise unexpectedly. They would just as likely wound or kill a bystander in an exchange of gunfire as a crazed shooter. Or, would they assume that a student who is acting out but not armed is about to go over the edge? How about a wild-eyed parent who is enraged about a child’s grade?

Two other points should be emphasized: Mass killings at schools are exceptionally rare; and placing more guns in schools increases the prospect that they will be stolen or misused.

Writing in Education Week in 2014, Russ Moore, a principal at Shaker Junior High School in Latham, N.Y., a hunter and a gun owner, made the case against having teachers and other school personnel carry guns: “I do not have enough faith in our citizenry – regardless of their comfort level with handling guns – to believe that everyone would have and/or use the proper judgment in the many uncomfortable and sometimes intimidating, even threatening interactions that can and do present themselves in the school yard or building.”

He concluded, “Educators carrying guns? Not an answer to the policy questions before us. My guns stay at home.”