AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

I understand that the idea of armed teachers is controversial, though I don’t fully understand why. You have to go through a background check to be a teacher and another to buy a gun. The Left is constantly lionizing teachers as unsung heroes who can do no wrong, at least as a group.

Now, we talk about allowing them to carry guns if they so choose and you’d think we were talking about allowing prison inmates to vote or something.

The problem, however, is that many of the arguments against allowing teachers to carry don’t square with reality.

Take this tidbit:

There is absolutely no reason that teachers should ever have guns in the classroom, a place of learning and not combat. Arming teachers is the government’s way of pawning off the responsibility of gun control onto civilians instead of taking initiative and passing laws. It is the government’s responsibility to protect its people, not the teachers’ responsibility to shoot down someone in the event of a school shooter.

This is a common train of thought, the idea that it’s the government’s job to protect people, but it’s not true.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example, for a moment.

Let’s imagine a school. This school has a school resource officer assigned to the campus. It also has a very troubled former student who has gotten a gun and decides to kill his former classmates. The school resource officer, hearing shots, does nothing to protect the students and instead waits outside as the massacre continues.

If this writer is correct, then the government is responsible for failing to protect those students, right?

Too bad the court disagreed.

That’s right. It’s not a hypothetical; you probably figured that out pretty quickly. That happened.

Time and again, the courts have ruled that the police–you know, the part of the government armed and trained to respond to violence–have no duty to protect human life.

Now, the police will certainly try, because most of them are good and decent people who value human life. They’re driven to that line of work out of a sense of duty and a desire to help people. That doesn’t mean they have to do so.

Yet if the police have no duty to protect people, how can the government as a whole do so?

Easy. They can’t.

However, the writer continues:

Let us also acknowledge how dangerous and irresponsible it is to allow guns in the classroom at all. All it takes is one teacher not paying attention for a student to have access to a potentially loaded gun.

All it takes is one racist teacher “feeling threatened,” and another black child will die without justice. Guns have no place around children, in education, on the hip of someone whose only job is to educate our children in hopes of making the world a better place.

Ah, the old “racist feeling threatened” strawman that pretty much never happens. The writer just transplanted it to the classroom.

However, where is the decrying of racist teachers when it comes time to discuss education as a whole? Then, teachers are held up to be some saintly profession that we plebes aren’t cultured enough to understand, that they’re all driven by altruism and not the promise of summers off.

And yes, some are.

But they’re also human, and that’s all the more reason why they should be armed. It’s a human desire to protect children under your care. The mythical unhinged teacher waiting to feel “threatened” fails to note that teachers have taken guns into classrooms in several states for some time, and this “hallways running red with blood” has never happened.

In other words, like most other anti-gun rhetoric, it has no basis in reality.