Are teachers good, honest, self-sacrificing martyrs who don't get enough credit, or are they all just ravenous, violent people who are ready to pop off at a moment's notice?
For people like North Carolina's Governor Josh Stein, they can't make up their minds.
See, for me, I know that while some teachers are legitimate threats to students. I've talked about the real threat to our students before, and yes, it comes from teachers. Students are far more likely--200 times more likely, in fact--to experience sexual misconduct at the hands of a teacher than to "experience" a school shooting, and that word is in quotes because the definition is so broad for what counts.
Yet I also noted when I talked about that, how it's really just a small minority of teachers that are skewing the numbers upward. As such, I still support allowing teachers to be armed.
Stein, however, doesn't. He vetoed a bill that would allow that, then said this:
“This bill would make our children less safe. Just as we should not allow guns in the General Assembly, we should keep them out of our schools unless they are in the possession of law enforcement. Law enforcement officers receive more than 800 hours of public safety education, including firearms training. On top of that, School Resource Officers receive additional training to know how to respond to crises and how to deescalate conflicts, a requirement I supported when I was Attorney General. We cannot substitute the protection offered by well-trained law enforcement officers by asking teachers and school volunteers to step in and respond to crises while armed. Just last year, an employee at a religious school in Goldsboro left a gun in a bathroom that was later found by an elementary school student.
It should be remembered that the average police officer receives something like 48 hours of firearm training during their time at the academy, with only a few hours per year as continuing education. They're not exactly high-speed, low-drag operators as it is.
And no one is asking teachers to take the place of police officers for most offenses. There's no reason for them to do so. They're there to teach, not crack skulls and bust bad guys. The police and school resource officers still have a role to play.
But armed teachers aren't shown to make children less safe. Stein cites one incident where a gun was left somewhere it shouldn't have been, which is unfortunate, but he heard about that story because, frankly, it's rare. It's not a common occurrence anywhere, despite gun control advocates doing their damnedest to make it look that way.
There are thousands upon thousands of armed teachers and school staff throughout the nation. There are a couple of incidents like this annually.
Meanwhile, mass public shootings still happen at schools. While they're not particularly common, either, they're far more deadly than an employee accidentally leaving a gun in the john. As we saw at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, a school resource officer isn't necessarily going to intervene when things get bad.
Armed teachers don't make kids less safe. Quite the opposite.
See, while you don't hear about teachers shooting would-be mass killers, it's because those would-be mass killers pick targets where they're less likely to get shot before racking up a big body count. They meticulously plan the attacks and they try to think of everything--they screw up a lot, thankfully, but they try to get everything worked out--so they avoid places where they can't kill a bunch of people before getting shot themselves.
That increases student safety.
However, let's point out that Stein, a Democrat, is a member of the party that likes to deify teachers as some kind of unsung heroes deserving of more money for less work, who think whatever teachers want they should get, unless it's the ability to exercise the right to keep and bear arms.
