Opinion: Teachers in Catholic schools should be allowed to carry firearms

Active Killer events in schools are statistically hyper-rare. But school shootings do happen, and it is not a bad idea to think more about them and to consider options and solutions.

This most recent attack in Texas presents us with the outrageous spectacle of armed police officers standing guard outside the school while the murderer carried on within. More, while parents outside fought and pleaded to get into the school to try to save their kids, cops engaged the parents, handcuffing them, rather than engaging the killer.

Take a few moments and ponder this situation. In general, the carriage of firearms is strictly prohibited on school properties, often with the threat of grave punishments. In my state of North Carolina, it is a felony to possess a firearm on any school property. Just to possess it. Not to use it harmfully, or display it threateningly, but to have it safely concealed on your person, regardless of whether you have a concealed carry permit.

Think this through for a moment. A citizen with a concealed carry permit—an obviously law-abiding person who has gone through the trouble and expense of the extensive background checks and such involved in getting this government permission to exercise a Constitutionally protected right—stands on the sidewalk outside a school zone, and remains a law-abiding citizen. That citizen takes two steps onto school property and thus commits a felony. This is insanity.

But because of these rules and the outlandish punishments that are threatened against those who violate them, you can generally assume that schools are truly gun-free zones. Another term for such places is “soft targets.” Someone looking to cause the most harm with the least risk will invariably pick a soft target. The problem with deciding to shoot at folks outside of “gun free zones” is that people there might have guns, as a would-be mass murderer discovered recently in West Virginia.

It’s unsettling to write about hardening up our schools. Don’t we wish there were no crazed murderers about, looking to massacre harmless children? And yet, in our depraved culture, unsurprisingly, we find no shortage of hopeful murderers. Though there are many causes, including fatherlessness and the corresponding loss of the virtue of religion, it is glaringly obvious that our murderous culture will breed murderers. We can have a “gun control” conversation another day, though the short version of my response to gun control is that unless we go full Australia, it is manifestly pointless—and we manifestly should not (and Constitutionally cannot) go full Australia.

So hardening up the schools is an obvious consideration. Obvious. In Uvalde, the murderer simply walked through an open door—a door that was supposed to be locked. I do not say that the murdered couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. But he didn’t have to. Locking doors is a pretty simple idea. Let’s start there.

But I would like to urge Catholic school administrators to consider another pretty simple idea. Let your staff—if they want to—carry their firearms, just like they do off duty.

We are told that teachers and school administrators do not need to be armed, and shouldn’t be. Those guns are dangerous and, besides, the school staff aren’t properly trained to handle active killers. We need to let the professionals handle it.

The things wrong with this line of thinking are too numerous to mention or address individually. The timeline, for one thing, doesn’t work—by the time the shooting is recognized for what it is, the cops are called, the cops arrive, and the cops enter, there has always been a long time for the killer to rampage unimpeded. Uvalde makes this shockingly and disgustingly clear. But Uvalde is not, and cannot be, an outlier. At Sandy Hook, officers entered the building at 9:44. The first 911 call was made at 9:35. The shooting is believed to have started at about 9:34. So it took roughly ten minutes for the police to arrive at the scene of the murders.

At the Parkland mass murder, the shooting started at 2:21 or so. At 2:22, School resource officer Scot Peterson arrived at the building where the murders were happening and remained outside doing nothing. At 2:27 the first Coral Springs officers arrived on the scene. Officers did not enter the building until 2:32, in a four-man team. Evidently, two officers had tried to enter a different building at 2:29. By then the murderer had already left the scene.

Obviously, the police do not always cringe and cower. Justin Garner, for example, walked alone into a North Carolina nursing home to stop an active killer. But even if the police arrive quickly and immediately engage the murderer, there is still a delay. Eight people were killed before Garner stopped the killer in Carthage.

How difficult is it to see the problem here? No matter how fast police are sent to the scene, there is (a) no kind of guarantee that they will respond appropriately and (b) a huge time lag.

I cannot offer solutions to (a) apart from referring to Fr. Stravinskas’s recent homily on manhood. But I can offer the obvious solution to (b). Allow teachers and administrators who wish to carry firearms at school to do so. Unlike the police, who are not there, the school staff is there. The time lag is reduced or perhaps even eliminated when the people who are present can effectively fight back. Again, ask the fellow in West Virginia about this. (Well, you can’t, because an armed citizen who was present when the shooting started killed him before he managed to murder anyone. But you see what I’m getting at.)

There are, undoubtedly, things to iron out. A Catholic school administrator who wants to protect kids from mass murderers will have to think through the best rules to establish. We might ask, for example, whether an armed school staff member must receive specialized training, and if so, what kind, and how much?

I’m strongly in favor of anyone who owns firearms receiving serious professional training. And the complexities of an active killer situation do probably demand some special skills and knowledge. That’s why I’m heading this month to Ohio to take a class called FASTER Saves Lives, a 3-day training program for teachers and administrators. I’ve had pretty significant defensive training in the past, with some great teachers, including Craig Douglas, Ernest Langdon and Chuck Haggard, among many others, but this class focuses on schools.

Unfortunately, it will be irrelevant to my work life. I’m sorry to say, I’m unwilling to risk a felony conviction for bringing my gun to work. Since I’m far more likely to fall and hurt myself, or to have a heart attack, and to have my gun discovered by EMS, than I am to be anywhere in the vicinity of an active killer on campus, I make the gamble to go without my gun. I’ve got some legal self-defense methods available while I’m at work, to be sure—not that I’d like to try them out against an active killer. But we all make our choices.

Still, the question here isn’t whether people should get training—the answer to that is yes—the question is whether they should be required to get training. And the answer to that, in my view, is, let’s talk about it. The sooner, the better. But let’s talk about it in this context: by agreeing that allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns is an obvious move, and then let’s quickly sort out the best ways to bring that situation into being. School is basically over for the year. Let’s be prepared to start the fall with new policies in place.

This issue of training is often used as an objection to the proposal of allowing school staff to carry their guns: “Oh, we don’t want all those untrained people with guns in schools!” But that’s not the correct way to think about it. The right way to think about it is this: given the realities of the culture of death, we do want armed teachers in schools because it’s the only way to actually have a chance of stopping an active killer. Now, what’s the best way to handle having armed teachers?

Along those lines, let me also say that people often talk about “arming teachers,” as though there were some plan to snag Mrs. Smith out of her third-grade classroom and force her to strap on a gun. Obviously not. If Mrs. Smith has no interest in carrying a gun, then I don’t want her to carry a gun. It’s a serious commitment, and I don’t want anyone doing it who doesn’t really want to do it. I’m not interested in arming teachers. I’m interested in allowing armed citizens, who are teachers, stay armed when they’re teaching, just as they are in other parts of their lives.

The cult of expertise and specialization that dominates our world prevents us from accepting simple solutions and answers. Note how people will so often attack homeschoolers, saying they are not “properly trained”. As though teaching a kid requires “certification.” This is the same nonsensical thought that underlies the notion that we have to leave protecting kids to the highly-trained professional cops. It’s nonsense. Parents are the primary educators of their kids, and they are also the primary protectors of their kids. Nobody outranks us in this matter. Catholic school administrators: you are entrusted by the parents with the children. You must do your best to keep them safe. This means you must allow your employees who wish to bear arms to do so.

Catholic World Report