The “teachers packin’ heat” bill is advancing in Florida.
As if on cue, reason number 45,238 why this is a terrible idea.
Yikes. This demonstrates not only the need for mental health services but better vetting of teachers.
Not just teachers, but anyone seeking to purchase a gun.
Per the NYT podcast that Frink recommended, determinations of mental illness sufficient to forbid gun ownership are difficult to obtain.
“Vetting” should not be limited to mental health considerations, let alone extremely rare cases of mental illness. There’s a lot of room for improvement here.
I don’t know what vetting is involved in becoming a teacher, but it should extend beyond mental health.
Certainly giving someone the ability to teach kids geography warrants less scrutiny than giving them the ability to kill all of them. But that doesn’t mean no scrutiny.
Even without a gun this guy shouldn’t be in a classroom.
That would demote him to “crazy guy with a gun outside the school”. Or “crazy janitor with a gun inside the school” for that matter.
Vet all school employees! That’s the point. Make the schools safe. It’s about mitigation, as one says.
Yes, that would demote all of them to “crazy guy with a gun outside the school”. Risk mitigated!
I’m saying we should keep the crazies out of school employment.
My question is, are we sufficiently confident in our ability to vet the hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country, that we think kids would actually be safer when we allow the teachers to voluntarily carry guns into the classroom? I am not that confident. Rather, I believe that the likely outcome is that while there might be fewer mass shootings by intruders (although I am not even sure about that), it would be offset by a greater number of shooting incidents involving the teachers’ firearms.
Also, people can become crazy over time. We’ve all seen incidences of people starting out fine, and slipping gradually into mental issues. This “vetting” would have to be done constantly.