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Until people view the ability to implement weapons as part of the school’s defensive life safety codes (i.e. structural composition and fire safety), and implement legislation to to act upon it, little will change.

The Sandyhook murderer simply shot the “bulletproof” glass until it caved. Once compromised, he climbed though. It took a moment to accomplish and had anyone been armed it would have ended there. The Uvalde murderer jumped the fence and walked up to the building. It doesn’t do any good to armor the front door if the murderer can simply walk around to the side/back of the building or shoot through the barrier for several minutes before police arrive.

At my children’s elementary school, visitors had to be buzzed into the hallway… but… a physically capable person could have simply jumped over the low counter and entered… or walked around to the back of the building and entered.

You forgot something…. duty of care. Generally, teachers and staff ‘duty of care’ covers only two main things: Its not a duty to prevent all harm – and – take reasonable care to prevent harm where it is reasonably foreseeable. But the context for those is for things under control of the teacher or staff in the ordinary course of school activity to exercise reasonable care to protect students from injury. Outside of that ‘ordinary course of school activity’ is where schools fall flat. So this thing that the teachers union want you think about how they are ‘protecting’ the kids – you need to take it with a very big grain of salt because its, at best, subjective. But this ‘ordinary course of school activity’ is what the teachers union pushes.

You see this concept echoed frequently in an indirect manner when this subject comes up in relation to school shootings and allowing teachers to be armed – the complaint is “no, teachers should not be armed they are not cops.” and then the teachers unions get involved trying to turn it into the typical left wing anti-gun argument with all sorts of things they spout.

So this begs a few questions. One being is just what good does that ‘duty of care’ for a school do if the schools leave the kids defenseless simply because anti-gun?

Now granted, my wife and I do not have children of our own. But the rest of our family does and they spend time with us just about as equally as they do their own parents and we care for them like parents. So I have an idea of what it should be, that a real parent would be willing to die if necessary to protect their kids from a mentally ill killer, and would fight to the last breath to protect their kids. My wife and I would be willing to do the same for our nieces and nephews in our care, they are our kids too and we would do the same to protect any of our family from a mentally ill killer. So when we pack these kids up to send them off to school, we expect the school to be willing to exercise that same ‘duty of care’ if it came down to it. And here, they do – we have armed teachers and school staff and school resource officers as well, with some armed volunteers ready to respond.

They may not be cops, but are teachers and staff human? Its doesn’t take much to lock a door, but if you look at school shootings overall in the last 40 years you find that the majority of victims are injured/killed within 20 feet of a room that could be locked or was locked and they could not get in (i.e. Oakland Calif, Nashville), or in rooms that should have been secured but were not (i.e Uvalde), or in larger common areas (i.e library) where they were left to escape or hide the best they should (i.e. Columbine) – even in schools that had plans and drills in case it happened. The one common and constant thing in all school shootings in the last 40 years where there was injury or death of students or staff when the mentally ill killer showed up is that where these victims were injured or killed they were without any means of self-defense and the police saved exactly zero of those victims that were were injured or killed when they needed to be saved from that injury or death.

Have there been teachers and staff go beyond this ‘ordinary course of school activity’? Yes, there have been and they got very lucky, but luck or not some were saved – but the question is what were their chances? Some would say their chances were pretty good because they succeeded but success its self is not a measure of chance of success because in every case where a teacher or school staff were successful all it took was a moment of timing to be off or a wrong turn or even being too loud and their ‘success’ would have vanished. That’s the way it is when all you can do is react blindly and not controlling the situation, the tempo and the where and when is set by the mentally ill killer so what happens when that ‘success’ suddenly vanishes when you are face to face with the mentally ill killer?

Allow armed teachers and staff. In the worse case its better to have some chance than no chance at all, in the best case you succeeded and saved yourself or others from a mentally ill killer – and the only one there to save you or others is you when you come face to face with that mentally ill killer. The excuse of “The school has a lock down plan, and we do this and that and other….” falls flat, when there are injured or dead. So back to the question…. They may not be cops, but are teachers and staff human? Humans exercise a ‘duty of care’ for the young ones in their charge – its built into the human species to do that, to be willing to fight to the death to protect our young and that’s ‘duty of care’ also.

So the Teachers Union needs to take a step back and shut up about ‘duty of care’ and ‘”The school has a lock down plan, and we do this and that and other….” and stop their griping and BS opposing armed teachers and staff. If they are not willing to enable teachers and staff the armed ability to fight to protect our kids from a mentally ill killer then the teachers union is as mentally ill as that school shooter for they doomed those kids when they came face to face with that mentally ill shooter. Its not complicated like the teachers union wants to make it – its a normal natural human instinct to fight to protect ourselves or our young when the threat is imminent.