Why Teachers Can't Bear to be Armed

I wasn’t going to write overly much on this, because I have so much to do, but I saw someone say this, and felt like a rebuttal was truly necessary, because I imagine this will become an oft-heard talking point in the coming year:

No one has presented an argument MAKING teachers carry. Only that the ones comfortable have the RIGHT too! Removing the “gun free zone” LAWS is common sense. It does not mean you have to!!

The big problem with the arm-the-teachers argument is that it’s taking a problem which confronts the whole nation, and declaring it to be solely a problem with schools. It’s ignoring not only conventional gun violence and suicide, but the many mass shootings which have taken place in non-educational areas like theaters, nightclubs, and concerts. Moreover, it takes this massive problem that politicians avoid touching because they have to choose between looking like idiots and losing their campaign funding, and makes solving that problem the responsibility of already overwhelmed school administrators and faculty.

And remember, American schools are still grappling with the problem of bear violence. 

So let’s say - hypothetically - that the president’s arm-the-teachers philosophy becomes policy somehow. Let’s say ‘gun free zones’ are eliminated, and the debate moves onto how to properly arm the schools. The president’s plan (as he has thus far outlined it) assumes that 20% of a school’s faculty will be qualified and willing to conceal & carry, but he’s also indicated that the more guns there are, the better, saying “it’s all about volume” and that the most important part of this plan is deterrence (which depends on intimidation, which is a matter of appearance). So, in sum, the appearance of safety requires 20% armament in each school, but more would be better.  

Obviously, some parents will pitch a fit about armed teachers – they’ll either have to accept the situation, home school, or drain the coffers sending their students to private gun-free schools.  As those parents run from the schools, the pro-gun parents who stay behind will carry even more weight.

The remaining parents believe the hype, that guns are necessary to keep their students safe. They believe that guns serve to deter predators, and they logically conclude that their child’s school doesn’t just need guns; it needs to have more guns than any other school. That way, when someone in their area decides to gear up to massacre a bunch of kids (because we’ve decided that preventing that is impossible), they’ll be driven towards one of the poorer, less well-armed schools.

I mean, that's one of the basic things they teach you when you learn to hunt, right?

Potentially life saving addendum:
The guy next to you runs slower if you shoot him in the leg first.

Those parents will be the ones kicking up a fuss because your faculty is only 3-5% armed, or demanding that their student be placed only with armed teachers. Parents will be discussing whether they can bus their kids to better armed schools, private schools will be showing off their arsenals, and politicians from the county level all the way up to the senate floor will be asking what our schools are doing to live up to our expectations.

What can the administration do?

The schools were supposed to pay out bonuses to armed teachers, either as compensation for the training/risk or as an incentive (it wasn’t really clear) but no one ever proposed any serious legislation to allot money for that. A lot of parents think that’s how it works, but it’s not – any extra money for arming the teachers comes out of the school’s budget. No one ever allocated money for the rising insurance costs, either, or the money for schools to protect itself from law-suits involving teachers using their guns or not using their guns.

For a while, the school just tightens its belt. New teachers who aren’t C&C qualified get lower starting salaries than their predecessors, old teachers who aren’t C&C qualified are forced into early retirement. Some resources are skipped over. Some support staff is laid off. They minimize spending on food, maintenance, and educational materials. Unfortunately, given the woes that have beset educational funding for decades, they've tightened their belt as far as they can; Imperial engineers cut fewer corners when building the Death Star, and they didn't even spring for a wire screen over the most vulnerable portion of the structure. 

Also, the Death Star literally had no corners.

So, the administrators are going to have to find a cheap way to up their gun numbers, and appease the parents. Two obvious solutions will occur. First, they’ll unload the cost of the training and weapons on the teachers. Second, they’ll defray their other costs (e.g., insurance, legal protection) by getting help from sympathetic organizations and businesses.

Most non-tenured educators have a very weak position with respect to employment. If their employers don’t want them anymore, they don’t have to fire them; they can just choose not to re-hire them for the next year. That means the school can renegotiate a teacher’s contract at the end of every year, to give her more obligations, or (more often) they can simply hint strongly that if she doesn’t do x, y, and z, then she won’t be rehired for the next year – she is easy to replace, after all.

That being the case, when the school starts falling behind in the arms race, the administration can start ‘hinting’ that they need more of their teachers to be prepared to keep the school “safe” (a.k.a., “competitive”). If they’re feeling especially unsubtle, they might even add that some of the faculty should be thinking about enrolling in some C&C classes before the year is up. In case it’s not obvious, there’s a veiled threat in there – get armed, or we’ll replace you with someone who is.

And it's probably worth pointing out that, for better or worse, that's going to have a significant impact on the faculty's demographics.

Your new Driver's Ed teacher will make a joke about calling shotgun every time.
EVERY. TIME.

Of course, legally, as U.S. citizens these people still have a choice about whether they C&C, but as teachers, if they want to keep their jobs they have to do what’s demanded. Maybe some people think an excuse to get a gun and a C&C permit sounds great, but given 2/3rds of Americans *don’t* own guns, I think most of us don’t really want to.

• Maybe some of us are near-sighted and clumsy.
• Maybe some of us don’t want to have anything to do with guns for religious reasons.
• Maybe some of us don’t want to get shot by a panicky or overly aggressive police officer.
• Maybe some of us have children at home, and don’t want to risk having an accident.
• Maybe some of us are coping with anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder, and don’t want to keep an implement of impulsive suicide nearby.
• Maybe some of us are trying to get out of a volatile relationship, and don’t want to have a weapon in our home where our domestic partner might access it.
• Maybe some of us have had traumatic experiences involving gun violence, and don’t want to deal with PTSD-related flashbacks every time we hear one fired at the gun range.
• Maybe some of us just don’t want to spend our personal money on getting trained, certified, and armed. (And don’t forget: teachers probably won’t be able to deduct those expenses.)

And that's okay, right? Because Americans still have the right to NOT bear arms, don't they?

But if we follow the president’s train of logic, teachers won’t have that right anymore. In order for teachers to remain teachers, they will have to train to use a gun, buy a gun, and keep a gun.

And the gun companies would be foolish not to ‘step up’ to the occasion. They’d know schools will be desperate for partners who can help cover their insurance and legal costs, and they’ll know most teachers would only be minimally invested in fulfilling their weapon requirements. So they’ll send the NRA around the country to hold after-hours presentations with teachers who have to tell their families to eat without them, because they’re getting lectured on the latest and greatest ideas about guns in education - a phrase that should only make sense in the context of a public service announcement by G.I. Joe. 

In 2020 the military will finally replace "knowing" with "bullets."

If gun manufacturers have even an ounce of sense, they'll create a gun that costs 25% of what their crappiest gun costs, and sell it to those teachers for 75% of what people pay for their crappiest gun. They’ll tell everyone it’s an educator’s discount, of course; just them doing their part to keep America’s schools safe.

And parents won't hear teachers complain; teachers will stay quiet in public.

They’ll stay quiet when droves of good teachers quit because they can’t bring themselves to give their money to what they see as an immoral industry. They’ll stay quiet when teachers with physical or mental disabilities are forced out of education, because it’s not safe for them to handle guns. They’ll stay quiet when a black teacher gets shot by a cop (or any random white dude) who saw them carrying a gun and felt threatened by his presence. They’ll stay quiet when a teacher tries to break up a fist fight between a pair of hormonal teenagers, and gets shot with his own gun. They’ll stay quiet when a teacher kills someone’s dad because she thought he was about to shoot up her school. They’ll stay quiet when a couple of students assault a teacher, take her gun, and go on a shooting spree - killing armed teachers and looting their weapons.

For decades, school shootings were blamed on kids emulating video games,
and now the answer is to put ammunition and additional weapons on the shooter's targets?
You might as well assign the teacher's XP values.

Because how can teachers say anything at all? They’re not allowed to take a stance on anything ‘political’ and – for some reason – this is political. If a teacher’s spouse so much as puts up a pro-gun-control sign in their yard, the teacher will get reprimanded for pushing his lefty ‘libtard’ agenda on impressionable minds.

So yes, teachers will (mostly) stay quiet, and every single way in which this idea will fail – and it’s a long list – will be blamed on the teachers. Education will suffer, and parents will blame the teachers. Students will die, and the GOP/NRA/FOX News will blame the teachers. Teachers will die, and the president will blame – well, he’ll probably blame Hillary, immigrants, or CNN. But academia’s full of immigrants, so he can probably still get the teachers in there easily enough.

So, if you’re baffled as to why teachers are pitching a fit right now, that’s why – because next year they may not be able to.

"Well that explains it..." Scapegoating Mental Health in the Wake of National Tragedies

Please, stop treating mental illness as an explanation for mass violence.

I get that you mean well, trying to generate awareness for a national problem, but it's not coming off that way.

According to GunviolenceArchive.org, about 15,000 Americans are killed by guns. Those deaths are the result of premeditated murders, botched robberies, 'crimes of passion', incompetent law enforcement, and the negligence of 'responsible' gun orders. A relatively small number of those deaths are the result of mass shootings. Oh, but wait... what does the fine print  on that site say?

"22,000 Annual Suicides not included"

And that's just suicides-by-gun. Expand the list to include cutting, poisoning, etc., and the death toll is over 44,000 Americans a year. For a sense of scale, last year's mass shootings claimed 346 lives. Each time such a shooting happens, parents cry out in terror because they fear their child could be the next victim of some unstable lunatic. But every 12 minutes, when a mentally ill person ends their life... most Americans don't really care. Parents don't flood Facebook or Twitter every 12 minutes with posts about how their child could be the next victim of suicide. They don't argue about the impact of politics or government budgets on suicide. Every twelve minutes, mental illness kills someone, but thoughts and prayers are reserved for the survivors of the monthly rampages, and advocacy for better mental healthcare in the United States only pierces the din when a mentally ill person kills a 'normal' person. The message from most Americans seems to be that the mentally ill can go hang themselves. Literally.

While we argue about dreamers and coal miners, mental illness kills five Americans an hour. Five an hour, and most Americans are silent on the matter, only bringing out the words 'mental illness' when they need to explain a national tragedy in human form. "Mentally unstable" is like 'witch' or 'heretic' - it's a label that explains everything heinous, from a rampaging gunman to a greedy president. And no one even really wonders or cares what 'mental instability' consists of, because as far as most Americans are concerned, there's only two dimensions to mental health - completely sane, and bat-crap homicidal.

What history of mental instability did the Florida shooter have before gunning down teenagers at school?

Do you know?

Did you actually read any articles, or did you just see, "shooter had history of mental instability" in a headline, nod your head knowingly, and say "Well, that explains it"? What part of his mental health history explains killing 17 high school students?

Apparently, Nikolas Cruz had a history of ADHD, depression, and possibly autism.

So, which of those mental health issues do you believe motivated him to kill 17 people? Was it his difficulty focusing on tasks? His feelings of hopelessness and thoughts of suicide (he had in the past cut himself and implied he intended to shoot himself)? Or was it being autistic, that should have warned everyone that he was a mass-murderer? Which of those things 'explains' his actions?

Or maybe, just maybe, there were other red-flags that we could be talking about. Expulsion from school? Death of his mother? Perhaps his history of violence at home? Or maybe the swastika and "I hate ******s" statement written on his backpack? Or maybe - and I know this might seem like a stretch - we should have become concerned when he announced his intentions online and used his limited adolescent financial resources to go out and purchase ten rifles.

No, of course not. Getting kicked out of school, losing a parent, and perpetrating domestic violence are too common to be red-flags, and glorifying a genocidal fascist regime while collecting an arsenal of deadly weapons only singles him out as one of the "forgotten men" that would have voted for the current president (if he'd been 18 in 2016). None of those things 'explain' what happened, because for the most part, juvenile delinquents, orphans, fascists, and gun fetishists don't go on shooting sprees. Despite the fact that mass-shooters are almost exclusively white men, we don't generally shake our heads and say, "well, that explains it" when a shooting happens, because we still expect that most white men won't go out and murder a group of people.

But apparently we feel differently about people coping with autism, ADHD, or depression. Apparently, unlike being a literal Nazi, having a mental health diagnosis is enough to label someone as "mentally unstable." That vague categorization in turn is enough for people to look at a tragedy like this and say, "well, that explains it." It's enough to send parents to the internet, clamoring for someone to do something about mentally ill people, before some 'maniac' harms their children - never mind the fact that about 7% of the people flocking to the internet have depression, and over 10% of their children probably qualify for a diagnosis of ADHD.

Oh, it's 12:30pm - 15 Americans - many of them teenagers like the victims of the Florida shooting - have killed themselves in the time I've been writing this.

Don't get me wrong, America gravely needs to address its problems with mental healthcare, and it needs to address its problems with gun violence. I appreciate people standing up and talking about those issues, calling for changes; but could we please stop treating these as the same issue?

Limiting the constitutional rights of Americans based on mental health diagnoses isn't a fair compromise in the debate over gun control. You're saying that Americans diagnosed with mental illnesses aren't entitled to the same constitutional protections as other Americans, saying that they can be placed under the same restrictions as felony criminals. You're saying that all Americans have the need and right to defend themselves - except the mentally ill. You're passing out guns to misogynists, white supremacists, anarchist militiamen, freaky evangelicals, and children (at least in 30 states) but then telling the person with ADHD, "we don't serve your kind here." When you talk about doing that, you're telling millions of Americans with mental illnesses that you trust almost anyone more than a person who has been treated for mental health issues.

That's not a strong motivation to seek treatment, is it?

And by all means, please advocate for better mental health care, better insurance coverage for mental health care, better wellness in life. Advocate for programs and ideas that can prevent, treat, and manage mental illness, as well as protect the mentally ill from discrimination and violence. But please, also realize that we need to destigmatize mental illness, so that we aren't punished when we seek help. People with mental illnesses cope with it all year round; for many of us that means that every 12 minutes we have to make the decision not to become part of that 44,000 that won't make it to the end of the year. Dealing with that continuous grind is all the harder when most other Americans only voice concern about mental health care when a Nazi shoots up a school.

Also, please stop saying Trump is crazy.

It's an insult to crazy people. Not joking; it really is.

In closing, I'm reminded of some words from cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard. Even now, transvestism is something of a contentious point in society, with it some times being the basis for a mental health diagnosis. Some of what Izzard has said about that definitely feels familiar.

"Also, if you're a transvestite, you get lumped into that weirdo grouping, you know? When I was in New York, there was a guy in the Bronx who was living in a cave…like you do, and he was coming out and shooting at geese and… a lot of weird things going on with this guy; and the police picked him up and they found a collection of women's shoes, and they thought, 'Maybe he's a transvestite.' And if he is, he's a ****ing weirdo transvestite! I'm much more in the executive transvestite area. Travel the world, yes, it's much more executive... J. Edgar Hoover, what a ****head he was! They found out when he died that he was a transvestite, and they go, 'Well, that explains his weird behavior!' Yeah, fucking weirdo transvestite!"