Another Perspective: Arm the Teachers and School Staff

By JG Vibes

In the wake of any sort of public shooting, the question is always asked: “What can we possibly do to prevent this from happening in the future”.

When that question is asked the most popular answers are sadly always filled with misinformed gun control rhetoric.  Many people suggest that if the government were to force ALL citizens to turn in their guns, or turn in their powerful guns, that this will somehow take away the criminals ability to inflict harm on people.

This very naive assumption is based on the idea that a government actually has the ability to successfully prohibit items, which when looking at the drug war, they obviously are not able to prevent people from possessing, selling or manufacturing any item, they are only able to impose stricter sentences on someone, should they be caught violating said prohibition.

This is not only false hope, but a false solution as well, allowing people to believe that the problem has been solved, when in fact nothing has been solved, politicians have merely scrawled more words onto paper and made more threats.  In reality they have done nothing to solve the problem.

If someone were to truly want to solve the problem of school shootings, they would allow various, random staff members to carry guns, and post signs allowing intruders, and potentially violent students to know that they will not get very far if they plan on carrying out an attack.

Allowing random staff members at choice to carry weapons, instead of mandating all teachers to do so or mandating them not to, would bring an extra element of security to the equation, because no one would know which teachers were armed and which ones were not, forcing them to assume that all of them are.

For an attacker, knowing that they are walking into a firing squad can be a very strong deterrent.  On the other hand, under our current “no gun school zone” policies, attackers are given the message that the whole building will be defenseless.

As many of you who follow my regular work are already aware, I am an advocate of unschooling and homeschooling, and I feel that the kind of schooling that we have today is counterproductive and oppressive.  There are a lot of great teachers out there, who care about what they do and have every good intentions, like the world famous educator John Taylor Gatto, but as he found, the top down structure of the school system and the curriculum provided is very damaging to the minds of children.

He left public schools by writing his resignation letter in the op ed pages of the wall street journal, starting the letter off by saying that he “refuses to continue hurting children”.  He then went on to start an incredible career in writing, researching and speaking out about the dangers of compulsory schooling.

This element is important, because the public school system combined with other forms of child abuse has worked to create the kind of violent and angry culture that we see today.  When you treat people like prisoners and second class citizens for the most vital developmental years of their lives, you are going to create confused, bitter and deranged people.  There is still value in group learning settings, and there is still value in teachers, but what we have today is indoctrination, not education.

With that being said, whether we are talking about a place of voluntary group learning in a free society or the compulsory public schools that we see today, the administrators should be armed.  A convenience store clerk protects his store with a gun, and by the same logic a teacher or administrator should be able to protect their schools with a gun as well.

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J.G. Vibes is the author of an 87 chapter counter culture textbook called Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, a staff writer and reporter for The Intel Hub and host of a show called Voluntary Hippie Radio. 

You can keep up with his work, which includes free podcasts, free e-books & free audiobooks at his website www.aotmr.com