Locked and Loaded in Harrold

In my first instance of linking to an earlier post, you may remember the wit with which I handled the decision of the Harrold school district to allow its teachers to carry concealed handguns.

Now the New York Times weighs in on the subject with a good deal of detail and color (don't you know that editors in New York love it when the phone rings about a story that confirms their worst stereotypes about Texas? I'm amazed that it took the writer five paragraphs to use the words "frontier justice"). This is a topic that I will confess that I don't have the answer to, but I will tell you what I think. The issue here is simple: safety. Clearly the school board--and by extension, the residents--believe that the best way to keep their students safe is to allow teachers to have weapons on campus. And the question readers should ask themselves is, "As a parent, would I feel safer too?"

My answer is no. Though I understand that we have to do as much as possible to protect our kids from the shootings that have plagued our schools, I have a hard time believing this is the best way to do it. A couple of things:

1. Which has the highest likelihood: A psychopath enters a school with the intention of killing as many people as possible? Or a teacher accidentally misplaces a weapon during the course of the school year? (Or ten teachers or twenty, since we don't know who has one?)
2. If it's the latter, it's not much of a stretch to imagine what accidents might happen if a student stumbles across the weapon first. That's a blow to the safety argument.
   
3. Harrold argues that it is too far from the local sheriff's office in case there's an emergency. In my mind, that speaks to a larger concern about police and EMS protection in the town. I realize this is a rural area, but wouldn't officers naturally gravitate to a population center, in this case the school, if they were worried about a shooting or other incident?
   
4. Is it really safer to have teachers intervene in a crisis by firing a weapon, even with the training they receive? I've been trained in CPR, but trust me, you don't want to pass out on my watch.
   
5. But if you answered yes to number 4, doesn't it at least seem reasonable to have only one person on the faculty (a principal, say) who is specially trained to handle a firearm in a crisis situation? That would solve the problem of having an officer assigned to the campus. And it would limit the number of weapons in the school, which would make an accident far less likely.

As it stands, the school is taking too much of a chance, and I worry that Harrold, in an attempt to make schools safer, has done the opposite. So what do you think? Let me know in the comments section or by answering the nifty poll to your right.