Teachers In Utah Are Doing Something AWESOME To Protect Their Students

I saw this on my local news and thought “DUDE – I love my state!”

According to this, the Utah Shooting Sports Council offered a free concealed weapons class for teachers on Friday. In Utah, teachers who have CCW permits are allowed to carry concealed firearms onto school property, which goes a long way to deterring criminals from using those magical “Gun Free Zones” that schools tend to be as target practice. Funny thing about CCW – bad guys don’t know who has a gun or who’s going to oppose them –

From the article –

During the Utah Education Association break Friday, the Utah Shooting Sports Council offered a free concealed weapons class structured specifically for teachers and others working within schools. The class involved discussion, demonstration and practice scenarios in safe gun use in school environments.

After the instruction, participants could pay a $49 fee and submit an application for a concealed carry permit to the Department of Public Safety.

Utah laws not only allow concealed weapons in public schools, but it prevents districts or administrators to prohibit concealed weapons.

Clark Aposhian, Utah Shooting Sports Council chairman, has instructed concealed weapons classes to teachers each year since the early 2000s. He said the lack of danger-preparedness in schools make them easy targets for crime.

“A shooter who wants to end his life via suicide but take a whole bunch of other people with him, probably wants to pick a place to exact that evil plan without getting return fire,” Aposhian said. “We are hoping to show that Utah schools and universities are not a place to do that.”

I know people freak out when the suggestion of allowing teachers to conceal-carry in schools comes up. It’s usually the same nitwits who think that the gun is going to spontaneously start killing kids without any prompting from an outside source (they probably think those “Gun Free Zone” signs contain magical fairy dust that’s going to neutralize any scary guns that come onto the premises). What they don’t get about this law is that it’s completely voluntary. Unlike most education-related legislation, teachers have the OPTION to carry firearms. They can choose if they’re comfortable with the responsibility. If not, that’s totally okay – not everyone wants to own a gun. Some people don’t own cars. I don’t own a hairdryer.

And here’s the other thing about conceal-carry permit holders – the required training courses and the background checks are rigorous. The instructors make sure that everyone who goes through those classes knows exactly what they’re doing and is competent enough to carry a gun. And strangely enough, the kind of people that these kinds of programs attract are the most sane, rational people anywhere. You’d never see some nutter who just wants to shoot up a school go through a course like this. And you don’t typically see anyone who’s just there to show off and be an idiot. The difficulty weeds out the people who aren’t serious about it. It’s not the military, mind you. It’s not about the physical exertion. It’s the mental exertion. Which most law-abiding Americans are more than capable of handling, if they want to.

The other thing about this is that it only takes one teacher or staff member at a school to stop a shooter. It could be the principal or a teacher or the janitor who pulls out a handgun and stops a psychopath hellbent on killing kids. The police could be 5-10 minutes away – but the school staff are already there.

As an aside – This post by author Larry Correia is still my favorite piece about gun control and how gun laws ACTUALLY work. As well as being a kick-ass sci-fi author, Larry’s also a foremost expert on guns and gun laws (that was part of his former day job before becoming a full-time author – in fact, he used to teach CCW courses in Utah. Including courses offered for free to teachers, just like the ones in the news story) and I constantly find myself referring back to this post. Here’s the part where he talks about arming teachers –

The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.

But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.

But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.

Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.

Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.

When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.

Even though I don’t have kids of my own (yet), I’ve seen these school shootings and think about other people’s kids and what those parents go through in those incredibly scary moments. And I think of how these hings could be so much different if there was a good guy (or several good guys and gals) with guns to counteract the bad guy. I’m all for allowing teachers to pack heat at school. If it makes them feel safer and better able to teach their students knowing they’re prepared in case the worst happens, then freaking do it!