Giffords Posts Odd Take About Armed Teachers

As we noted here on Thursday, Iowa is looking to arm teachers. Armed teachers are already a thing in a number of states and there haven’t been any real problems with it. In fact, Utah has had armed school staff for a while without a problem.

However, groups like Giffords cannot fathom the possibility of anyone carrying a gun anywhere. A lot of people like them tend to say they support the Second Amendment–they ignore their own founder’s words, of course–but they really don’t seem to under stand the term “bear arms” at all.

In this instance, Giffords took to X, formerly Twitter, to take issue with Iowa. In the process, they didn’t exactly help their case.

Can we please just let teachers teach?

Trained police officers fail to strike an intended target over 50% of the time — why do we think arming teachers will result in anything but tragedy? pic.twitter.com/RRB6V11fuX

— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) January 25, 2024

“Trained police officers fail to strike an intended target over 50% of the time,” they say, and yet they expect us to call the cops?

OK, let’s back up a minute.

At no point is anyone trying to make armed teachers mandatory. No one is telling teachers they have to carry a firearm. Some teachers really shouldn’t be armed, in part because of their own temperament.

But some people want to carry a firearm. They recognize that when a school shooting is happening, teachers are already on-site. They’re not coming to the school with sirens screaming and blue lights flashing. They’re not waiting outside like in Uvalde. Teachers are in the building.

So they want to carry a firearm, but current law prevents it. These laws don’t require anyone to do anything they don’t want to do as an individual. It simply allows a pathway for people who would like to carry a firearm to do so.

And still teach.

“Trained police officers fail to strike an intended target over 50% of the time — why do we think arming teachers will result in anything but tragedy?” they asked, but the answer is that yeah, it will.

First, as noted, we’ve seen armed teachers in some states for years now. There aren’t any tragedies to speak of, so it’s a bold assumption to make that there will be nothing but tragedy going forward.

Second, I’ve seen some of the training required of these teachers in some places. Frankly, they’re better trained for dealing with a situation in a school than police. They go through a lot more training and more specific training than some police departments.

Yes, that’s a dig at those departments, but it’s also true.

Further, let’s also keep in mind that citing the figures of police misses doesn’t help your case that we should call the police instead of defending ourselves. That’s especially true for teachers who not only know the environment they’ll be in better than any cop could but also can take pains to make sure they’re not missing.

After all, they know every potential bystander. They have a lot more motivation to get it right than some police officers do.

The truth of the matter is that Giffords tries to make a case that armed teachers are bad but, really, gave us a pretty good reason why some teachers might prefer to be armed in the first place.