On Tuesday, ReasonTV uploaded a new video featuring John Stossel. The topic of the video was “armed teachers.”
What can be done about school shootings? Some say kids will be safer if some teachers carry guns. President Trump said that … Trump was mocked for suggesting teachers have guns … but Trump’s critics probably don’t even know that many teachers have brought guns to school for years. In Texas, teachers carry in about 200 schools. This high school advertises that.
At Keene Independent School District (ISD), the parents interviewed by Stossel appear to like the armed teachers program created by Superintendent Ricky Stephens.
STEPHENS: We know our staff and our teachers are gonna go. Do we want them to go with a pencil, or go with a pistol?
STOSSEL: The teachers have handguns against somebody with a big gun. That’s not much.
STEPHENS: It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. If you go there with nothing, you have no chance of stopping anything.
STOSSEL: The police come, they see your teacher with a gun. How do you keep them from shooting her?
STEPHENS: We train a lot with our local law enforcement, so that helps us because we want them to know at least we’re there, and at least recognize us. If they happen to get shot while they’re stopping a tragedy, all of our guardians have said, you know, that’s just the price of being a guardian.
Stossel then spoke with an anonymous teacher, who said, “We have to have a fighting chance if something should happen at our school.” The armed teachers are anonymous so potential school shooters don’t know who is armed, and who’s not.
Then there’s the oft-repeated progressive critique that armed teachers create new dangers. Stossel cited one instance in California in which a teacher accidentally fired a gun into the ceiling, and some falling debris injured a student. However, he said, there are more recorded instances in which a teacher saved his/her students using firearms.
He also noted the distortions the media has made about Trump’s gun proposals.
As for Keene, Stephens said, “The school purchases a gun, and then we give them, and register them to our teachers.”
“That way,” Stossel said, “he can make sure all teachers have training in the same type of gun.”
Stossel concluded the video by going over perhaps the biggest myth related to school shootings — that they’re a growing epidemic. They’re not.
Check out the entire video here: