OK, arming teachers.  Sure, I’ll wade into the debate.  First off, I’m just amazed we’re taking this idea seriously and actually discussing it.  In your gut you know it’s a horrible idea.  As other commentators have said it makes a school sound more like a lock down prison than a place of education.

But here we go.

STOPPING POWER (sounds so detached and scientific)

First off, let’s talk about the stopping power of a handgun versus and AR15.  Let’s go big on the handgun although it’s certainly debatable what size side arm a teacher should use.

But let’s take a 9mm for example, nowhere as big a round as the famous 45 but still a nice chunk of metal.

Now it turns out an AR15 is pretty equivalent to a 9mm hand gun in term of stopping power.  Here’s a fun video of a guy shooting a 9mm and an AK15 into some coconuts to roughly appraise their relative impact.

The kick from a 9mm is pretty ferocious and I’m not sure the average smaller framed female teacher would be able to handle that gun and maintain any semblance of aim past the first round.

Now let’s look at how the teacher is going to fare in a gunfight with someone carrying the AR15.  First off, the hand gun will never approach the rounds/second of a AR15, nor should it.  A handgun will typically have a smaller magazine of only 10 rounds or so.  Empty that magazine quickly and, um, well you’re empty.  The AR15 can fire many rounds in the time it’ll take to swap magazines.

Aim is another factor.  A handgun will typically not be able to aim with great accuracy and certainly no compared to a should-stabilized long arm.

Now in a real world shootout, there’s the possibility the shooter will position themselves such that you can’t get a really clear shot without risk of hitting someone behind or around the shooter.  They don’t have a similar problem as they want to hit pretty much everyone they can.

So we have a small handgun against an AR-15 class rifle.

It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight. — David Mamet, The Untouchables

The main thing that handgun is going to do is make sure the gunman takes out the teacher first.  The likelihood that the teacher will get a round or two off and hit the gunman is pretty small.  So now we have a dead teacher and the gunman goes about their business.

OK, so probably doesn’t help significantly during an actual live shooter situation.

BUT WHAT IF?

How about day to day with the teacher carrying a weapon?  What could go wrong there? Various pundits have posited that the weapon could be taken away from the teacher, providing a handy source of a deadly weapon inside the school and past all the metal detectors.  Oh, but the gun won’t shoot except for the owner, you say.  Hmm… last I knew the NRA was pretty against that concept.

Now there is a pretty decent correlation between the number of guns and the amount of gun violence so we’ve just upped the gun count inside a school and we can therefore statistically determine there will be a greater amount of gun violence in the school as a result.

Wait a minute…. oh yeah, it’s coming to me!  Unless the school zone is magic! That’s it!  That’s just about as rational as anything else we’ve suggested so let’s go with that.  Insides of school are magic!  Why didn’t we think of that sooner?