Of Course No One Will Be Told Which Teachers Are Armed

I’m honestly not sure if I’m just hypersensitive to the psychosis that infects so many people in the media to the point that I see bias where there wasn’t really meant to be, or if it really is as bad as it seems.

I mention that because as I come across stories each day, some headlines are kind of jarring to me. Some are easy enough to chalk up to a lack of understanding about firearms–I’ll have that story a little later–but others just seem bizarre to even mention if you’re not pushing an agenda.

Like this story about an Idaho school district. They’re going to have armed teachers. That’s a very good thing in my book, and just knowing that some teachers are carrying guns makes it far less likely there will be a school shooting in that district at all.

But what irked me was the headline, which read, “Teachers in Idaho school district to carry guns on campus, but parents won’t know who.”

The Idaho-based St. Maries School District is now allowing teachers and faculty to carry guns on campus and in classrooms.

Parents will not be notified which teacher is carrying a firearm. Only building principals will know which of their staff are carrying guns.

“They can assume that everybody is armed,” Seth Stoke, chairman of the St. Maries School Board, told The Spokesman-Review after the board voted 4-0 to finalize this new policy. “The whole idea is not knowing who is carrying.”

In order for St. Maries staff to be permitted to carry a firearm on campus, they must have an Idaho enhanced concealed carry license, a completed national background check, and their own firearms. The school district will not provide firearms for teachers to use.

Staff members will also be required to be screened and interviewed by local law enforcement, in addition to the board of trustees and the superintendent. Teachers carrying firearms on school grounds will need to go through 40 hours of training, which includes de-escalation and threat assessment.

The firearms will have to either be on the approved staff member’s person or in a district-approved lock box at all times.

Maybe it’s just me, but the inclusion of the whole “parents won’t know who” seems a little like the media trying to stir something up here.

Like Stoke said, the whole idea really is not knowing.

There could just be two in the entire district, but the fact that any would-be attacker wouldn’t know who or where is a check on such an attack. It’s something that would have to go into their mental calculus while planning an attack, and since the goal of would-be mass shooters is to kill as many people as possible, they’d likely avoid any school in the district.

There’s a reason mass killers pick gun-free zones like schools. They don’t want to get popped before they can kill as many as possible. Our own John Petrolino talked a bit about that on Wednesday. It doesn’t work out well for them when there are armed people present.

So it just strikes me as kind of obvious that parents wouldn’t be told which teachers had guns and which didn’t.

Mentioning that they won’t know just seems like a way to rile parents up over the fact.

Or maybe I’m just bent out of shape because of too many years seeing way too many journalists trying to stir stuff up, and this was just a report that let parents know not to ask or something. I mean, it’s Idaho, so it’s possible.

Either way, it still seems pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it for half a second.