Editor’s Note: AR State Attorney General shot this down. No teachers with guns in the school.
TPM: Arkansas Attorney General Won’t Let School Arm Teachers
By Alex Kane / Alternet
deathandtaxesmag.com
Twenty teachers, administrators and staff are using an Arkansas law to arm themselves while working at Clarksville High School.
A high school in Arkansas has decided that the best way to confront gun violence is to arm teachers and administrators with guns. The Associated Press reports that 20 teachers, administrators and staff are using an Arkansas law in order to arm themselves while working at Clarksville High School–the first time a school district in the state has armed teachers.
The law in Arkansas allows licensed, armed guards in schools. After going through over 50 hours of training, teachers and administrators will be considered guards.
“The plan we’ve been given in the past is ‘Well, lock your doors, turn off your lights and hope for the best,'” the superintendent of the school district in the town, David Hopkins, told the AP. “That’s not a plan.”
The impetus for the arming of teachers was the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut last year. The National Rifle Association has led the battle cry for armed teachers in schools.
State officials are not blocking the plan, though some are not happy about it.
Here’s how the program works: teachers are given a stipend of $1,100 to purchase a handgun and holster. The district is paying $50,000 for training and ammunition at a gun academy. The academy holds trainings that simulate school shootings. Teachers shoot “airsoft” pellet guns while students wear facemasks and jackets.
“There’s pressure on you, because you’re shooting real bullets if this actually happened,” explained Cheyne Dougan, the assistant principal at the school who will start carrying a 9mm gun while on the job. “I was nervous to start, but once it started and I was going through what they had taught us, it just took over.”
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Guns are everywhere. San Diego Unified School Police now carry weapons, thanks to a special Homeland Security slush fund. Fortunes are being spent on weaponry and “defensive” strategies here and there, all okayed by Homeland Security. There’s little resistance to this combined cash-cow and political minefield. I wonder about the future of the Arkansas Attorney General who blocked this mad idea to arm teachers.
Guns are dangerous even in the hands of “the authorities.” See the Sundance-award true-story film, “The Fruitvale Station,” now making a brief appearance at area theaters. (It was up at Landmark for several days last week and has already moved on to Reading Cinemas where last night maybe 12 people were at the 8 p.m. show in Clairemont.)
This movie re-creates the last day in the life of 22-year-old black Oscar Grant — an out-of-work father to a little girl, a son, a grandson, a lover and a friend — detained with others after a disturbance on a packed train out of San Francisco in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009. With other black friends, he was removed from a train, forced to sit or kneel on the floor of the BART station platform by armed transit police. In front of cell-phone-wielding passenger-witnesses, Grant was verbally abused, handcuffed, beaten and finally, in a terrible confusion of fear, shouting and threats, he was shot in the back while lying handcuffed on the station floor by a transit cop. He died in hospital later that day.
At trial the transit officer claimed he had meant to tase Oscar Grant but shot him by mistake.The cop was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served one year of a two-year sentence. He was fired by BART.
Thanks for this sobering comment and movie summary. There are too many guns as it is.
Twenty armed staffers in one high school. I wonder how long it’ll be before we hear of a shooting there. Either one of them will shoot too soon or a student will take the weapon and use it. Mark my words.
What if the armed teacher is the one that goes crazy because of finance problems, personal problems, mental illness and shoots the entire school?
These crazy liberal school teachers, they are everywhere.
Search Google for “Virginia Teacher Lines Students Up and Shoots Blanks at Them”
“Greenwich teacher accused of threatening to shoot up middle school”
“California college professor planned shooting at high school after son’s suicide, police say”
So glad I don’t have kids.