The Birmingham News
Nov 12, 2006

Are Pistol Packing Teachers a Good Idea?
By David McGrath

My immediate reaction to the barrage of criticism of Wisconsin legislator Rep. Frank Lasee,  for proposing that teachers be allowed to carry guns in order to protect children in the nation's schools, several of which were sites of fatal shootings in the last month,   was to hold up my hand.

While such a gesture may signal "wait just a minute," or "hold your horses," or "let's give the man a chance," what I really was doing was displaying the tiny, faded scar on the fat part of  my forearm, a result of a puncture from the tip of a pocketknife, owned by a 16 year old student attending an inner city school.

It's not as bad as it sounds.  I was, once upon a time, an urban high school teacher, and he was a pupil whom I barely knew, who was arguing in the hallway with another student.  I brazenly intervened (like all other 29 year old men,  I assumed invulnerability).  When I asked for his i.d., he  cooperatively  began searching for it, rooting through all the junk in his jacket pocket, which included a pocket knife with a four inch blade and a broken  spring hinge.  Still pouting about the other student, he roughly complied when I told him to hand it over, accidentally sticking me, and the rest is history.

But that history also includes less bloody but more dicey episodes through my years employed there,  when I wished I were packing heat.   There was the 15 year old student named Darryl who spun around  and threatened to "blow me away" when I grabbed him by the shoulder for apparently trespassing in the hallway.  But I was stunned, too frozen by fear to move even if I had been armed.  

I let him run off that afternoon.  But on the following Friday,  I spied him leaning against a locker in a crowded area during lunch period.  Approaching him from behind, I   pinned his arms behind his back and marched him to the principal's office.  A search produced no weapons, and he may even have been bluffing a week earlier.  It turned out he wasn't a trespasser, but one of 4,000 students enrolled in the school.

Then there was the February morning I arrived and was about to unlock my classroom door when I smelled the sweet, pungent odor of cannibis wafting from the nearby foyer.  As I approached, sparks flew as three teens, two males and one female, stamped out cigarettes and blew their last exhalation to the ceiling.  They knew they couldn't bolt to the outside, since the panic doors were chained and padlocked (a school security measure that trumped fire code violations),  and I could see them sizing me up: should they trample over and past me to escape down the mile long hall?  In the meantime, I tried to  use anger and indignation in the absence of gun or badge.  It worked,  but while we were making the long trek to the disciplinarian's office, one of the miscreants groaned that he thought I was police,  and "Not just no English teacher."  Otherwise, he said,  he never would have turned over his i.d.

It was then that I realized, others  must have  thought the same thing.  The boys flashing gang signals across the street every afternoon at 3,  when I reported for bus loading duty, surely must have been thinking that those of us standing on the periphery of the crowd of waiting students, were some kind of armed security guards.

Or those of us checking the faculty parking lot between morning classes,  after some recent hubcap thefts.

Or some of the same men patrolling the bleechers during Friday night football games.
I suppose we looked like police to kids. And I, like so many other teachers, was doing the job of police, without the benefit of Kevlar  or service pistol. 

Back in the day, a teacher/disciplinarian wasn't all that much to remark about when a ruler or a switch or simply a stern look was all the equipment necessary for the job. 

But as society became more violent and more well armed, so did students.  Many teachers continued their jobs to keep schools safe, barehanded,  while a handful of others gave up and locked their classroom doors.

Which is why some of us gave momentary, wistful consideration to Legislator Laxlee's proposal.  The fact is, there were days, many dark hours when I wish I had a uniform or a holster or a badge or even a German Shepherd to make my job a lot easier.

But if a Glock or Colt were added to the mix of aforementioned episodes,  it's possible there would have been some actual shots fired in the hallway or lunchroom or bus stop.

And multiply that slim but real possibility, times the  6 million teachers in the U.S., and you might have a problem even more  serious than the recent spate of school shootings,  which precipitated Laxlee's  idea of pistol packing profs in the first place.

A provocative idea, Mr. Laxlee.  But weren't we talking about school safety?