Giving Compass' Take:

• Jessica Charles discusses the danger of training teachers to view the world as threatening, which would hurt students - particularly students of color. 

• How can student safety be improved without creating a threatening atmosphere?

• Find out what teachers would like to be armed with. 

Even police officers can’t always shoot accurately.

More guns mean more gun deaths.

The majority of the U.S. population doesn’t want to see teachers armed.

These are just a few of many poignant insights about the absurdity of arming teachers that have emerged since the massacre that killed 17 people on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Particularly moving have been the voices of students who simply want to feel safe at school and teachers who never signed up to participate in armed combat in their classrooms. Importantly, those voices have called out the National Rifle Association and Republican lawmakers for the ridiculous suggestion that, in addition to the already demanding workloads teachers face, some should also carry a loaded weapon to school in case an intruder armed with an assault rifle begins shooting the children in their care. But the issue runs deeper than adding the unwanted and dangerous task of policing schools to teachers’ jobs.

To prepare U.S. teachers to respond to school shooters, teacher-educators would likely be driven to cultivate a very different professional vision in new teachers. Rather than a hopeful stance, teachers would be taught to assume a fearful one. Rather than dismantling their biases, teachers would likely fortify them. Teachers would need to remain vigilant and see their classrooms as potential battlefields at all times. Potential threats would need to be swiftly assessed, and teachers — 80 percent of whom are white — would likely draw on the same problematic social frameworks that police do in determining who is good and who is bad.

This would increase the likelihood that children of color, who are already disproportionately and harshly disciplined for minor infractions at school, would become the metaphorical and literal targets of underprepared teachers relying on their implicit bias to wield firearms.

Equipping teachers with guns will add to the dangers that students face rather than reduce them.

Read the full article about arming teachers by Jessica Charles at The Hechinger Report.