Stop asking teachers if they’ll kill children

Whenever we had lockdown drills, I’d get angry with my students. The lights were off, the door was locked, and students were seated silently under their desks. For about three minutes.

Then, the whispers began. Muted laughter followed; Phone screens flashed as students texted their friends, taking advantage of this “break” from learning.

{mosads}After the drill, I tried to impress its importance upon them, but the routine would play out the same next time.

I couldn’t blame them. The majority of these students weren’t even born when Columbine happened. They were a generation who’d grown up with mass shootings and a 24-hour news cycle.

They regarded lockdown drills with the same flippancy that my high school friends and I had regarded fire drills, “Relax, Ms. Langhorne. We’re all fine; there’s not going to be a real fire.”

What my students didn’t realize, as they tried to secretly Snapchat from the dark corners of the classroom, was that I, and probably most teachers, spent the 15-minute drill surveying the room and thinking about our odds.

In the wake of every school shooting, in the midst of the rhetoric about gun control and senseless violence, we hear stories about educators who sacrificed their lives to save their students.  These stories remind us of the better parts of humanity when faced with the worst.

However, the role of teachers in school shootings might change drastically with President Trump’s proposal to arm and train 20 percent of teachers.

I don’t believe that arming teachers will deter a shooter — mass shooters aren’t rational criminals; many of them are suicidal and/or prepare to die in the attack. I do, however, understand one part of the proposition: A teacher can save a lot more lives by pulling a trigger than standing in front of a door.

But what happens to the teacher after she pulls the trigger?

While not a mandate for every teacher, Trump’s plan still puts educators in a terrible position. By suggesting to teachers that they take up arms, we are no longer asking them to protect students by sacrificing their own lives, we are asking them to protect students by taking someone else’s.

This difference cannot be understated. The latter forces teachers to ask themselves: If I’m not capable of killing, will it be my fault if children die? Will the students next door stand a better chance because their teacher volunteered to have access to a gun?

Movies and television often paint killing and dying to save others as equally heroic acts, but acts of violence are often considered honorable by everyone except those who committed them.

Taking a life, even in self-defense, has damaging psychological effects on the person who did the killing. Military members undergo intense training to overcome their reluctance to kill, but most veterans still report suffering extreme Post Traumatic Stress after killing in combat.

The armed teacher who encounters a school shooter will inevitably have to make a terrible choice: Do I kill this person? Do I kill this child?

Remember, school shooters are often minors. The youngest school shooter on record was 11-years-old when he helped kill five people at Westside Middle School in Arkansas.

The teacher who answers yes to these questions will not only suffer psychologically from the act of killing, but will also likely undergo a trial, with her decision publicly scrutinized. Unlike those who enter the military or the police force, teachers should never have to make this kind of decision.

America, we need to do better than this. We need to do better for our students and our teachers.

Conservatives have discussed placing more armed officers in schools and rethinking discipline reforms with unintended consequences. Liberals have talked about strengthening gun control — banning assault weapons and increasing background checks, for starters — and addressing adolescent mental health more aggressively.

These are the conversations worth having. These are the policies worth discussing. Debating whether teachers should be licensed to kill is not the discourse of a civilized society.

Teachers today play the role of social worker, parent liaison, nurse, and more. We already ask them to do so much for their students; please don’t ask them to consider killing, too.       

Emily Langhorne is the project manager and education policy analyst for Reinventing America’s Schools Project. She previously worked for Fairfax County Public Schools, teaching high school English and directing writing centers.