House Bill 99, which would authorize Ohio school districts to allow qualified adults to carry a firearm on school property was passed with just two hearings. Now that it's poised to become law, opponents and supporters are still questioning the wording of the bill.
For example, the bill doesn't speak to liability in the event a teacher kills a student. Police have qualified immunity. Will teachers?
The bill also makes no mention of safe storage of a weapon. Will schools require the weapon be placed in a safe or will those who carry get to take the gun home?
Gov. Mike DeWine praised the legislation despite critics who say it doesn't provide enough training. The Ohio Supreme Court required at least 700 hours of training. The new measure requires no more than 24 hours.
(Kevin Landers. “Despite passing, Ohio lawmakers still have questions on bill allowing teachers to be armed.” 10 WBNS. June 02, 2022.)
Ohio is set to enact a law that allows teachers and other staff to be armed with guns in schools once they have completed up to 24 hours of initial training. Those who helped write the bill say qualified school staff who carry a firearm will act just like those who conceal carry outside schools.
The bill's biggest critics, aside from the state teachers' unions, are law enforcement, including the Fraternal Order of Police.
James Price, a professor emeritus of public health at the University of Toledo, has studied school shootings for years. He said research shows that even seasoned police officers deploy poor marksmanship in the heat of a shootout. Teachers who undergo much less robust firearms training, he said, are unlikely to fare better – and might need to shoot in a room full of children. Meta-analyses both from Price in a journal of public health along with the RAND Corporation failed to find evidence that arming teachers will meaningfully protect against school shootings.
(Jake Zuckerman. “Ohio’s response to Uvalde? Armed teachers and $117 million.” 5 News Cleveland. June 06, 2022.)
According to Price, the single best policy change to protect children from gun violence would be what he calls a “CAP law” — short for child access and prevention. They vary in scope and strictness, but they’re generally state laws that impose criminal or civil liability unto gun owners if children manage to obtain their improperly stored firearms.
Studies show that between 70% and 90% of guns used in youth suicides, unintentional shootings among children, and school shootings perpetrated by shooters under the age of 18 are acquired from the home or the homes of relatives or friends, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Thirty-two states have CAP laws on the books.
Between 2010 and 2019, Ohio was one of seven states that experienced increases of youth firearm death rates by 70% or more. As Price (an author on that study) noted, four of those states including Ohio have no CAP law. Two of them have weak CAP laws. Other research in the Journal of American Medicine that studies 26 years of firearms mortality data of children found that CAP laws were associated with statistically significant reductions in pediatric gun deaths.
(Hooman Alexander Azad, BS; Michael C. Monuteaux, ScD; Chris A. Rees, MD, MPH ; et al. “Child Access Prevention Firearm Laws and Firearm Fatalities Among Children Aged 0 to 14 Years, 1991-2016.” JAMA Pediatr. 2020;174(5):463-469.)
Melinda Wenner Moyer of Scientific American reports that about 30 careful studies show more guns are linked to more crimes: murders, rapes, and others. Far less research shows that guns help.
Moyer writes …
“John Donohue, an economist at Stanford University, reported in a working paper in June 2017 that when states ease permit requirements, most violent crime rates increase and keep getting worse. A decade after laws relax, violent crime rates are 13 to 15 percent higher than they were before.
“The belief that more guns lead to fewer crimes is founded on the idea that guns are dangerous when bad guys have them, so we should get more guns into the hands of good guys. Yet Philip J. Cook – ITT/Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University – says this good guy/bad guy dichotomy is a false and dangerous one. Even upstanding American citizens are only human – they can 'lose their temper, or exercise poor judgment, or misinterpret a situation, or have a few drinks,' he explains, and if they're carrying guns when they do, bad things can ensue.
“Although we do not yet know exactly how guns affect us, the notion that more guns lead to less crime is almost certainly incorrect. The research on guns is not uniform, and we could certainly use more of it. But when all but a few studies point in the same direction, we can feel confident that the arrow is aiming at the truth – which is, in this case, that guns do not inhibit crime and violence but instead make it worse.”
(Melinda Wenner Moyer. “More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows.” Scientific American. October 01, 2017.)
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The Bottom Line
Unanswered questions about Ohio's House Bill 99 uncover potentially deadly risks with allowing teachers and staff to carry guns on campus. Plus, research shows the prevalence of more guns means the greater likelihood of more crime and violence occurring. These risks are not acceptable in public schools.
Arming school personnel? Among educators, the idea is unpopular. Education Week in 2018 reported the results of these surveys:
Teach Plus, a national advocacy group for teacher leadership, polled 1,233 teachers and found nearly 80 percent said they strongly oppose arming teachers in school.
The National Education Association surveyed 1,000 of its members and 82 percent of respondents said they would not carry a gun to school even if they had firearms training and were allowed to do so.
And a Gallup poll found less than 30 percent of teachers think that arming teachers would be very or somewhat effective in limiting the number of victims in a school shooting.
(Staff. “Should Teachers Carry Guns? The Debate, Explained.” Education Week. August 24, 2018.)
Education Week also spoke to many educators who think carrying a concealed weapon is a bad idea, including school shooting survivors themselves.
Second grade teacher Abbey Clements was hunkered down with her students at Sandy Hook Elementary School as the country’s deadliest K-12 school shooting was taking place. “We’re not trained sharp shooters, we’re not trained first responders,” Clements said. “We are caregivers. ... I’m sure every educator out there would say that we want school safety, but arming teachers is not the answer.”
“I think we should have more security at school, but I don’t want our school to feel like a prison,” said Adeena Teres, a science teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the owner of a concealed-carry permit.
Jim Moffatt, a retired principal who was shot by a student at Fergus High School in Lewistown, Mont., in 1986, actively campaigns against legislative efforts to arm teachers.
(Staff. “Should Teachers Carry Guns? The Debate, Explained.” Education Week. August 24, 2018.)
When I Hear That They Want To Let Teachers Carry Guns
By Lupe
Mendez
i.
A knuckle pops in my throat the moment a
student,
an 18 year old, asks me,
maestro, would you take a
bullet for me?
and my classroom is an empty house as the
words
leave his mouth. My solar plexus caves. I say
mijo, I
decided that the moment I bubbled in the first
multiple-choice
question in my certification exam,
eighteen years ago. I’ve been
waiting for you to
ask this question.
I hope I pass
this test.
ii.
Mr. Mendez has a class of 35 students
in a temporary building facing the playground. The entrance to the
playground is at the far corner. A man in a pea coat enters at the
corner with a gun. An announcement breaks over the loud speaker “Mr.
Red is in the building.” What should Mr. Mendez do?
A)
tell all the children to hold their breaths, think of air, of
floating around in the sunlight.
B) tell the kids to count the
number of times they hear a footstep, a click, a bang, a body.
C)
tell them: freeze, exactly as you are, grip this poem, a pulse
crossing your temples.
D) turn out the lights, hide the children
in the books they picked up that last library visit.
iii.
And someone
says, “give the teachers guns”
I
stumble and shatter into
slivers of voice box and wails.
Mi salon es
una casa.
Do you want us to speak into an empty house?
iv.
When
time comes, I will put all you
students in my pockets.
when one doesn’t fit, I will stitch
another pocket on,
this one,
dead
center on my heart, and hope that
if that’s the one
that aims at me,
this is where we will be, that
I’m taken as I am.
The gun I
want is in the shape of a book, its pages,
the only shell casings
I need covering my floor.
Lupe Mendez is a Poet/Educator/Activist, CantoMundo, Macondo & Poetry Incubator Fellow ,and co-founder of the Librotraficante Caravan. He works with Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say to promote poetry events, advocate for literacy/literature, and organize creative writing workshops that are open to the public. He is the founder of Tintero Projects, an organization that works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub.
Chart Credit: Jen Christiansen; Sources: “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the October 7, 1993; “Suicide in the Home in Relation to Gun Ownership,” by Arthur L. Kellermann et al., in New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 327, No. 7; August 13, 1992; “Homicide and Suicide Risks Associated with Firearms in the Home: A National Case-Control Study,” by Douglas J. Wiebe, in Annals of Emergency Medicine, Vol 41, No. 6; June 2003
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