Teachers should not carry guns, despite alarming school shootings

As a teacher, mother of an elementary school student in Texas, and someone who once carried a gun for a living and has been trained in situational awareness and firearm tactics, no one perhaps is more prepared than I to carry a gun in my classroom. But I would never want to.  

The tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has many people talking about more restrictive gun laws, but some are also talking about the cost and moral implications of arming teachers. An important aspect may be missing from the latter discussions: most teachers are not trained in situational awareness. It is not hard to learn to shoot a gun; teachers could learn this with a few days of training. What takes far longer, however, is learning to respond properly to an active shooter.  

As a former staff operations officer at the CIA and former FBI special agent, I have undergone extensive training and am confident in my ability to run toward a violent situation, rather than away from it. But asking teachers to carry weapons and assuming they will be prepared for such a situation is risky. My training was rife with high-pressure scenarios, to work on a phenomenon known as “fear extinction.” This is where you learn to lower your fear response after multiple exposures to a stimulus. To dampen the pre-conditioned fear response to an active shooter scenario would require working with teachers on a case-by-case basis.   

A 2017 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of Americans surveyed supported arming teachers. To me, it’s an alarmingly high statistic that indicates many people think carrying a gun and facing an active shooter is easy. But consider this: Roughly 75 percent of recruits reportedly drop out of Navy SEALS training because they cannot adopt a “survival mindset” and are not mentally prepared for the emotional and physical stress of training. Essentially, they are unsuccessful at fear extinction.

Additionally, there is confusion regarding the actions of police and a school resource officer in Uvalde. Rather than arming teachers, perhaps we need to reconsider how we train police officers. Training offered at police academies is left up to states, only some of which cover “mental toughness training” in their programs. According to the program guide for the Bexar County Policy Academy in San Antonio, the largest city near Uvalde, there is not a section of training dedicated to situational awareness, mental toughness, or fear extinction. 

Those who support arming teachers do so partly because society tends to measure adeptness or proficiency in tangible ways. In weapons training, this would equate to how well you can hit a target and/or how fast you can unload your weapon. I do not doubt that if adeptness truly were measured this way, many teachers could be armed. But that fails to take into account the necessary emotional and psychological mindset that comes with being armed and being thrust into an active shooter situation.  

Arming teachers is not a new topic of discussion. According to the Giffords Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 18 states allow adults with carry-permits to be armed on campuses if they get proper approval from school officials. Of 1,200 public school districts in Texas, 110 have armed teachers and administrators. Twenty-eight states allow licensed teachers to bring guns to school; Texas is one of them. Officials will not disclose exactly how many of these educators do bring guns to school; that number is deemed confidential for security purposes. But Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, has said that arming teachers is “a bad idea. It’s always been a bad idea, and it will stay a bad idea.”

The Texas legislation that led to arming districts was H.B. 1009, which allows “public school districts and open enrollment charter schools to appoint school marshals.” Shortly after that bill passed, the legislature passed H.B. 867, which allows private schools to appoint school marshals. According to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCLE), “The sole purpose of a school marshal is to prevent the act of murder or serious bodily injury on school premises, and act only as defined by the written regulations adopted by the school board/governing body.” The commission requires school marshal candidates to take an 80-hour training course, conducted by a law enforcement academy that specifically provides the school marshal curriculum. Among the topics covered in the course are physical security, improving the security of the campus, use of force, active shooter response, and weapon proficiency.

Texas’s school marshal law doesn’t permit teachers to carry guns. Any school marshal who has routine contact with students must keep his or her firearm locked up, but accessible. Educators in the program are trained in decision-making skills, violence prevention, legal issues related to the duties of a peace officer, and active-shooter scenarios. The training also includes timed shooting exercises at various distances. This is the equivalent of 10 work days for a teacher — not nearly enough to train them in situational awareness, in my estimation. A quick calculation of my hours spent at CIA and FBI training academies works out to 2,350 and 1,904 hours, respectively — or 4,254 hours of combined training in weapons-handling, fear extinction and situational awareness.

Aside from training, there are practical questions that must be considered, such as: What happens if a teacher’s gun is left unlocked, is stolen, or gets wrestled away from a teacher by a disturbed student? Would giving guns to teachers make students feel safer, or would it put them more on guard, when instead they should be open to learning? Recent stories regarding armed teachers support the argument against arming them. A high school teacher in Georgia, for example, barricaded himself in his classroom in 2018 and fired a shot through his window. Also that year, in California, a teacher accidentally fired his gun, injuring three students, during a lecture on public safety awareness.  

When I left my law enforcement positions, I never imagined that someday I would be discussing with students and colleagues the question of whether to arm teachers. As a law enforcement officer, it was my job to protect citizens; as an operations officer, I protected human assets. Being armed helped me to do those jobs. As a teacher, my role is to educate students, enable them to become critical thinkers and, hopefully, to help them achieve their dreams. Carrying a gun would not help me do any of those things. 

Tracy Walder is a former staff operations officer with the CIA, where she tracked and debriefed terrorists, and a former Special Agent with the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. She now teaches high school history at Ursuline Academy in Dallas and is an adjunct faculty member, teaching criminal justice, at Texas Christian University. She is the author of “The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists.” Follow her on Twitter @tracy_walder.