Or What If Instead of That, Teachers Had Guns,Too?

December 14, 2012 - "B" Day at Orange High School in Orange, NJ. I know it was because my last class left at 12:40, and I had the next two hours to myself. I spent that time in an empty classroom, reading and watching the news unfold. Twitter told me the wrong person had done the things I was reading about. I exchanged text messages with parents of young children as we all tried to come to grips with the event.

I was sure that the modern American would stand up and demand change. Surely, we would step up and say, "That'll do, guns. That'll do."

Since that day, there have been at least 74 school shootings in the United States. Broken out in total school days, that means that approximately every 6 days, we can expect to hear that there has been a shooting on a school campus.

If you're scoring at home, that's more frequently than you can find a Sunday edition of your local newspaper.

Nothing changed following the event in Newtown. Actually Georgia passed some pro-gun legislation since Newtown, and the state has the most school shootings of any state since Newtown (10). The gun lobby and our politicians have worked to ensure that there is no change to our perceived Constitutional right to bear arms.

But this is our world. We live in it, and we need to adjust to it or fight to see it changed.

• We need to arm our teachers to protect our students, or we can take the guns out of the hands of the general population which would reduce the access people have to guns.

• We need to post armed guards at the doors to every school building, or we can drastically reduce public access to guns.

• We need to stop declaring our schools "Gun Free School Zones" so that criminals won't see them as easy targets, or we can severely limit the possibility of a person from obtaining a gun.

• We need to dress our students and ourselves in kevlar vests, or we can take away access to guns so that we and our students don't have to worry about being shot at.

• We need to have an open dialogue with our community about what needs to happen to protect our schools from future shootings, or we can take steps previously untaken to be sure that people who don't need to have guns don't have guns.

There's a lot that we, as a society, can do to protect ourselves when this happens again. But remember that guns are designed to kill something, and every time a gun kills something, it means that the gun worked. What if - stay with me - what if we actually got rid of the guns? There wouldn't be a rifle or a shotgun lying around the house looking like the perfect solution to whatever might be ailing someone at the moment. There wouldn't be aisles of guns in Wal-Mart next to the lawn darts and toilet paper. 

What would that society look like? Would there still be bad people? I'm sure. There are bad people now in countries where the population doesn't have guns.  Would people still have mental illness? Would people still commit crimes? Probably. But I bet we wouldn't be reading about a shooting in a school every sixth day. Then we could get to the business of healing with those people with mental illness and addressing the conditions in which people still feel the need to commit crimes.

To live in fear that a king is going to come be a tyrant over us and to use that fear as justification for an amendment open to interpretation is to ignore that King George isn't posing a threat anymore. It's ignorant. And now that we're on this topic of ignorance, anyone who feels like your rifles and your state militias are going to be able to stand against the single largest armed forces in the world is delusional. If the United States military decided to turn against the people, there isn't a state in the Union that could stand against it. 

I want this to be an America that moves forward into this century. I work diligently to ensure that my staff provides classroom experiences for our students that will lead them to be the best 21st century citizens that they can be. This country should offer no less. 

Quite frankly, this country actually continues to offer less. We spend more on our military than the next 8 countries combined and more than triple the country in the 2nd spot (China).  We are leaders of the developed world in two categories when discussing children. Child poverty and school shootings.  We refuse to protect the most vulnerable of us, and if we don't take great strides in directions not previously explored in our still youthful history, our legacy will not be one of improving America. We will be remembered as the generation who tried to protect our students from guns being brought into schools by bringing guns into schools.