Seventy-eight percent of public school teachers in North Carolina say arming teachers is a bad idea, according to a recent study conducted by Elon University.
Of the teachers surveyed in Elon’s study, nearly half admitted that they were not at all skilled or had never fired a gun. That makes the idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings (as some North Carolina state representatives have proposed) seem impractical and even dangerous.
House Speaker Tim Moore recently developed a committee to address school safety from the education, mental health, and law enforcement perspectives. The speaker said the group would take opinions from local school districts into consideration. Yet Moore didn’t rule out arming teachers as a possible solution.
More than 51 percent of the teachers who participated in Elon’s study believe that incorporating guns into the classroom setting would actually increase the number of deaths in public schools. There’s a wealth of data to back them up. For instance, this compilation of studies indicates that, at least on a state-wide level, more guns lead to more deaths.
Elon’s study comes on the heels of one of the world’s worst school shooting sprees at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where seventeen people were killed. And just yesterday, a seventeen-year-old girl was killed in what was allegedly an accidental shooting when a firearm discharged inside an Alabama school.
About 77 percent of educators surveyed said they believed that banning the sale of semi-automatic high-capacity weapons could help gun violence in schools. But those calls will probably go unanswered, as the GOP-led state legislation is unlikely to make changes anytime soon.
One thing that North Carolina teachers do agree on, almost universally: in a state where only 740 school psychologists serve roughly 1.6 million children, they desperately want more money for mental health care.