tiistai 1. tammikuuta 2013

Guns for teachers

What recently happened in Connecticut was heartbreaking. Many aspects of it were heartbreaking. I understand the need to find the guilty ones and the reasons. I also understand that it cannot ever be fully understood nor agreed upon which those were. It is important to discuss what could be done to prevent these kinds of things from happening or how could damage be kept to a minimum if something similar happened.

Having guns in schools is something really impossible to understand from my perspective because I live in a very different environment. I've understood there have been propositions to have teachers carry guns. Perhaps it's reality in some places already. 

As a teacher I could not personally handle that. Sure, I would like to be the hero who in a case like this would use the gun to scare the shooter to not do anything. That would be great. That would also be very improbable. 

I know killing one for the sake of saving many is kind of heroic or can be considered good. But I could not be the one killing that one. No matter how many lives that would save (and I could never be certain if it did save any lives or not), I would be the one living the rest of my life with the fact that I killed someone.

Yes, I know, I wouldn't have to kill, I could just injure, but I could not know in advance how I would react in a panic situation as such, no matter how well I would have been trained to use the gun. I'm not a soldier. I could not live with it. And I don't think it's fair to ask teachers, who are taught and trained to do things very much opposite of harming someone, to perhaps one day live with such a burden. 

There needs to be something else that can be done. And sometimes we also need to accept the fact that there will always be things we can do nothing about, no matter how well prepared we seem to be.

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