JoeyM wrote:
Another alternative: armed parents
“Each father, including me, is on a mandatory, rotating duty-schedule. Each of us is thus ‘on-duty’ several days each month, all day. Yes, we have to take days off from work. We are posted in the back of each classroom, visibly armed with both an AR and a pistol. All our weapons are constantly loaded and ready, and can be plainly seen as such.
Each child thus knows and understands that there is always a father, their own or that of one of one of their schoolmates, there with them in the classroom all the time, and he is able, willing, and committed to defending them with his life.
I suppose there might be some flexibility depending on ages, but I don't think that's a good idea. There is a small but extant chance of crazy showing up at a particular school. But the sight of an armed guard/dad every day is not an impression I want to make about the world on a kid.
There are bullies, there is news, there are plenty of ways that as a kid grows up they learn that the world isn't all sunshine and birthday parties.
I guess it comes back, at least in some ways, to that difference in how guns are perceived. To me, walking around visibly armed is a sort of threat. Even if it's reasonably clear that it's only a threat of "if you do x, I'm going to hurt you", it's still a constant reminder of escalation and violence.
For most of the conflicts a kid needs to work out, I don't think that's the first idea that should be reinforced. There does come a time where that's the answer, but for most conflicts (i.e. the >99.9999% that will happen in a kid's life) that don't involve a crazy, armed person, I'd rather reinforce a thought process that goes through reasoning, discussion, and possibly retreat, with injuring your antagonist coming as a last resort.
No perfect answer, but if you had millions of kids sitting through their school day with a parent (or a guard) at the back of the room just sitting there with guns, that's going to have an effect on how they think about conflict. And for >99.9999% of them, the situation that calls for it will never happen.
I recognize that reasonable people may believe that there will be no negative impact from having guns visible every day in the classroom. I respectfully disagree.
Another thought that just occurred to me about that sort of psychological impact: Anybody else about my age (born early '70s) spend years having dreams about incoming nuclear missiles? Thanks, cold war politics. If you have a guy with an AR-15 in the back of the classroom every day, I'm not at all sure what you're going to engender is a sense of security. It says "things could come down to a firefight any time now."