School and safety are typically two words that go hand in hand. You would expect that a place people send their kids to every day would be a safe place, however in recent years that doesn’t seem to be the case. More than ever, children, staff, and parents have to worry about school shootings. With the availability of semi automatics like the AR-15, it gives an opportunity to hurt many people in these situations. This is terrifying for a lot of people, and for a good reason, but some of the solutions that people offer up are not going to help the situation.

The idea of arming teachers in school is not something that should be up for debate. It is hard to imagine a soft spoken English teacher carrying a gun while teaching Shakespeare. Teachers are paid to teach, nurture and care for students, they are not here to shoot their own students. It is hard to believe any student, or teacher for that matter, would feel more comfortable knowing that their teacher had a gun. Having guns in the classroom could potentially cause students to be more intimidated by the teacher, or even uncomfortable or untrusting. Guns often turn an environment into a hostile and less forgiving place. Does that honestly sound like a good learning environment?

Teachers having guns aren’t going to stop school shootings, it will just leave a teacher replaying the moment they pulled the trigger and killed one of their own students. Teachers, are you ready to take a life? This isn’t something that should have to be on a teachers shoulders.

Instead of trying to arm people who are not ready to be armed, we should try and focus on mental health.
In every school shooting, the kids have been emotionally at risk. Something has caused them to want to hurt people in their school. Counselors and teachers need to pay attention to the signs that may indicate if a child is not okay. Mental health is extremely important, yet in high school, it’s as if mental health doesn’t even exist.
If I sound blunt, it’s because this is the only way my voice is heard. The administration in our nation, being the federal and local government, as well as school boards, don’t seem to listen to people my age. Only recently have we been able to make them stir them up, and we have only been able to do this by screaming as loud as we can, and stating the facts of what needs to happen in our country. We as a generation are scared, but we are fighting through our fear to make sure that we can make a change in our schools and our country.

We don’t need an army of teachers to protect us in school. What we need is to make sure that no students are in the state of mind that would cause them to want to hurt people.

This is not a matter of politics. This is not a matter of liberal versus conservative. This is a matter of our children dying, and being subjected to a tragedy no one should have to face.