Arming teachers

I have been a teacher for just over six months. In that time, I have seen three students attack teachers. I have seen or heard of quite a few students who have attacked fellow students. Our school doesn't even lock its doors. There is one School Resource Officer, but he is rarely on campus, and when he is, he spends his days surfing the internet. I had an incident in my classroom (a medical emergency) that required 911, and EMS beat the officer to my room.

In one attack, a male student was arguing with his girlfriend. He was yelling at her "I am going to kill you for that," and it so alarmed two staff members that they asked the girl to hide in the teacher's lounge, and they called for the SRO and the Prinicpal. It took ten minutes for them to arrive. In those intervening minutes, the two small female staff members (one of them disabled) tried to keep the young man away from the girl. He struck them and shoved them both out of the way.

What did the vice principal do about it? He suspended the boy and admonished the staff members, saying that them getting hit was their own fault, because no staff member is ever allowed to use force on a student for any reason. Then we as staff were all given training to that effect, where the administration told us that it is against state law for a teacher to ever use force or violence on a child. Being the new employee, I didn't argue. 

Because of a bill introduced in Florida that would allow some teachers to be armed,  some coworkers and I recently had a debate on the topic where other teachers expressed opposition to the idea. They claimed that having guns around kids was just asking for trouble. What if a kid took my gun from me, they asked. They also said that nothing would prevent me from snapping one day and killing a student who was getting on my nerves.

I pointed out that I spent six years in the military, 22 years as a firemedic, regularly compete in IDPA matches, worked for several years as a SWAT medic, and have carried a concealed weapon since I was 21 years old. I can carry that weapon everywhere else except school, and in all that time, I have never once had my weapon taken from me, nor have I ever "snapped" and killed anyone. The reply was that the other mass shooters had never snapped before, until they did.

Then one teacher said that she would support the law, as long as it was required by law to keep the safety on, so that the gun would not go off by mistake.

These are supposedly educated people.