With that as background we can see a school district that is preparing for the worse. Hopefully these volunteers only shoot on the range, but at least they will not be helpless in case of a disaster.
Teachers pack heat at gun school
A shooter is loose in the school. Vulnerable staff members cry for help as the gunman stands close and shoots them all.
Even the good guy with a gun, who was supposed to keep everyone safe, doesn’t make it out alive.
From the ground, one of the dead laughs and blurts out, “What took you so long?”
It’s a lesson in the first-ever Armed Teacher Training Program, where participants learn tactical maneuvers so that they might be able to take down a school gunman.
An instructor walks around, helps the teachers, administrators and maintenance workers off their backs and explains what went wrong. They run the scenario again.
This time, the good guy takes out the bad guy.
Jim Irvine, chairman of the Buckeye Firearm Association, said arming teachers is the best way to stop more mass murders, and gun control can’t help.
“Gun control is purely political and has no place in this conversation,” Irvine said.
This is why the Buckeye Firearm Foundation, a nonprofit with the association, paid $30,000 for 24 Ohio educators to learn how to react to a shooter in a school. The program is conducted by the Tactical Defense Institute, which trains everyone from civilians to federal agents in firearms and physical self-defense.
The 24 were chosen from more than 1,400 applicants. The program was organized after the December shooting in a Newtown, Conn., school that took the lives of 20 children and six staff members.
Deanna, an elementary-school teacher from central Ohio who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she doesn’t know if she would have taken the training course had the Newtown massacre not occurred. “Tragedy wakes you up,” she said.
Deanna said she feels better prepared to fend off a classroom shooter, but she does not think all teachers should have guns.
“This isn’t just, ‘Let’s bring in teachers and train them, and then everyone’s going to be able to carry a gun,’ ” Deanna said.
This is the only teacher-training program of its kind in the country, but school workers from across the nation have asked about future training classes, Irvine said.
The program began on Monday with classroom sessions and ended yesterday with active killer shooting, which involves gunman scenarios based on real-life situations, said John Benner, the owner of the institute that sits on a 186-acre training center in rural Adams County. It has seven ranges, three live-fire houses and classrooms.
In role play, the “good guys” use model Airsoft guns to shoot plastic pellets at other participants who are playing the “bad guys.” The scenarios are set in common spaces in schools, such as hallways and auditoriums, as well as in more-enclosed spaces such as offices.
David Bowie, an instructor at the institute, said the pellets from the guns hurt, which raises stress levels and results in better responses in a more-heightened reality.
Angie, a substitute teacher from northeast Ohio, agreed and said it’s valuable.
“You can walk through a scenario, you know, just mapping it out a hundred times, and it’s not going to be as memorable,” she said.
All participants have gone through concealed-weapons training, which covers basic firearm safety and marksmanship, and obtained a permit. Participants still need permission from their school boards to carry a gun while at school. In December, Attorney General Mike DeWine said it is something districts should consider.
Dick Caster, a senior consultant with the Ohio School Boards Association, said that to his knowledge, no Franklin County school district has allowed teachers with concealed guns into classrooms. Others in the state have, and he said many more are considering it.
Some participants in the pilot program already have permission from their districts, some will get it if they complete the program and others are planning to try to persuade their boards when the program is complete, said Irvine, who would not identify the districts.
DeWine’s office also offers a four-hour “active shooter” class through the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy, where educators can learn how to respond if a shooter enters their school. That training focuses on how to keep a shooter from getting to students, even if that means running, jumping out windows and blocking doors with desks. It does not include teachers with guns.
Not everyone is convinced that arming teachers is the best way to protect children.
“It merely contributes to the ‘gun culture’ that has socialized young people to believe that guns are power and an appropriate tool for resolving disputes,” said Dr. Antoinette Errante, a professor in Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology.
Her colleague, Dr. Deanna Wilkinson, called for more research before school boards widely adopt any policy allowing teachers to carry guns.
“I don’t care how much firearm training a teacher gets, I think kids will be afraid of their teachers,” she said. “There should be controlled pilot studies. If there’s a positive side to this, we need to know.”
But Anthony Head, a high-school teacher from the Dayton area, said the positive side to the Buckeye Firearm Foundation’s program is simple: Kids in his classroom would be safer if he had a gun. He’s making a pitch for that to his school board now that he’s passed the program.“
Post-Newtown, this is what teachers need,” he said. “This is our DEFCON-4.”
Again I pray this is never needed but I have to agree with someone after Newtown. "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away."
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