Combat Officer Perfectly Explains Why Giving Teachers Guns Won’t Work

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A former combat officer has explained why arming teachers, in light of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, in Florida, won’t work. 

Brandon Friedman served as an Army infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, later serving as an Obama administration official.

In an op-ed for the NY Daily News, he describes President Trump’s desire to arm teachers, ‘not as easy as it looks on TV.’

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He writes:

Arming educators is a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons, but I want to hone in on a crucial one: the fiction that arming teachers means they’ll be able to stop an armed attacker.

Unfortunately you just can’t make that assumption. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV. There were armed guards at Columbine, the Pulse nightclub and in Las Vegas at the time of the massacre. At Parkland too.

Time and again, armed civilians or security guards are out-maneuvered, out-gunned and too inexperienced. It’s difficult for a rational person to reach a state where they can go toe-to-toe with an armed psychopath who has nothing to lose.

I was professionally trained and still almost blew it at the moment of truth. If armed security guards often don’t stop shootings, teachers have no chance.

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His letter continues:

Here’s why: Instructing a teacher in how to use a gun does very little. Guns aren’t magical objects that turn a person into a skilled warrior, no matter how proficient one is at marksmanship

Gun fighting is less about the weapon and more about a state of mind. It’s about will. The will to assert yourself over — and kill — your armed adversary who wants to kill you. Developing this mental skill takes months or years of dedicated training and a singular focus that teachers don’t, and shouldn’t, have.

Teaching someone to handle a gun is a very different skill from teaching them how to fight. People who haven’t fought (or at least been trained to fight) often seem to miss this completely.

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In a meeting to discuss school safety on Thursday, Trump suggested movies and video games are influencing young people to become violent.

He said:

I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts. And then you go the further step and that’s the movies. You see these movies, they’re so violent and yet a kid is able to see a movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved. Maybe they have to put a rating system for that.

The Florida shooting is now the eighteenth to take place in a US school this year – the third deadliest in American history.

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