Arm The Teachers: Gun Control Petition Finds Its Political Opposite

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut has led the nation to launch into an increasingly bitter argument over gun control laws. As previously reported by The Inquisitr, this has led to a White House petition that demands lawmakers meet “for a bipartisan discussion resulting in a set of laws that regulates how a citizen obtains a gun.” Some have suggested moderate gun reform and others like Obama are pushing for outright gun bans. A new White House petition is saying that the United States should arm the teachers as a solution to school shootings.

According to the White House website, the signers of the document are petitioning the Obama administration to put:

A gun in every classroom. Arm every teacher and principal to defend themselves and their students during an attack.

If teachers and principals are armed and trained to defend themselves during a school attack there would be fewer casualties and less attempts to attack schools.

Fact: Crime rates decrease when the people are better armed.

It is time we gave our teachers the ability to defend themselves and stop pretending like a door buzzer is enough of a defense. Take a stand for school safety. Arm the teachers and principals today. A gun in every classroom will protect our students from massacres like the one in CT today.

Petitions started on WhiteHouse.gov need a total of 25,000 signatures to elicit an official response from the Obama Administration. The gun control petition blew past 100,000 signers fairly quickly. Other efforts like the Texas Secession met the mark within days after the results of the November Presidential elections. This idea to arm the teachers is not so popular, with only 2,241 signers as of this writing. Although the difference may lie in the media publicity the gun control petition has been receiving.

Arming the teachers with guns is not without precedent. According to Backwoods Home Magazine, Israel began a program of armed citizen guards in their schools after the Maalot massacre in the 1970s, when a large number of children were slain in a terrorist incident. Even with all the violence caused by Hamas and other Muslim terrorist groups, supposedly since this program was enacted Israel has not seen a single child murdered in an Israeli school. In fact, in 2002 one of these citizen guards shot down an attempt at a school shooting.

The citizen guards are not a privatized force operated by a company. Parents volunteer to serve in plain clothes and are trained by Israel’s home guard in how to properly handle concealed semi-automatic pistols. Israel loudly trumpeted the fact that the civilian volunteer guards, indistinguishable from the regular teaching and administrative staff, would be in place. This publicity serves as an effective deterrent to would-be school shooters.

Do you think the United States should arm the teachers as the petition requests or that we should form a school guard system like what operates currently in Israel?