Warning: Your teacher is armed!

      Emergency room doctors have recently gotten into the debate over guns, defying the NRAs retort to "stay in their own lane" and urging governments at all levels to enact more stringent gun control laws. 

     Today I just want to address one specific type of gun violence: school shootings.  The worst school shooting ever was the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007 where 33 were killed and 23 were injured.  If we exclude college campus shootings and focus on K-12, then the worst ever was the Sandy Hook shooting on December 14, 2012, where 28 were killed and 2 were injured.  Of more recent interest was the Sante Fe, Texas shooting on May 18, 2018, where 10 were killed and 13 were injured.

      Of course not all school shootings are "mass shootings", however one defines the word.  The most recent school shooting that has occurred on campus (as of this writing) was in Matthews, North Carolina on October 29, 2018, where 1 was killed and 1 was injured.

      And so, the debate rages onward over how to make it stop and protect our children.  One idea is to allow teachers to carry guns.  Interestingly, several school districts around the country have taken that step.  Most that did so began this policy after the Sandy Hook shooting.  A quick Google search brings up many articles about these school districts.  Here are a couple:  Town Hall, and USA Today.

       The state of Texas, not surprisingly, leads the pack, with 172 school districts allowing armed teachers.  See this article:  Caller.com 

      It should come as no surprise that the teacher's unions are very opposed to this idea.  In the above article, retired teacher and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) member Joan Salazar is quoted as saying that teachers should not be armed around kids:  "How easy it would be for someone to get a hold of that gun.  It's too dangerous.  Too many things can go wrong."

      Well, that statement prompted me to do some more Googling!  So I looked around for incidents where a teacher's gun was fired, for any reason.

       There was this incident in California, as reported in NBC News.  The teacher was holding a gun safety class.  He accidentally fired the gun, and three students were injured, mainly from debris falling from the ceiling.

    And there was this incident in Georgia, as reported by CNN.  The teacher barricaded himself in a classroom and shot a bullet out the window.  No one was injured (except a girl who sprained her ankle while running away).

      These are the only incidents I could find.  Note that in both, the teachers were immediately fired or suspended.  Meanwhile, it's interesting that in Texas school districts where teachers are armed, gun-related news is virtually non-existent. 

      So here is the choice, as I see it:  You can allow teachers to arm themselves, and take the chance of serious news boredom.  Or you can declare schools as gun-free zones, and risk turning on the news to learn that students have been killed or injured in yet another school shooting.