Should Teachers Carry Guns To School? Imagine the idea of being defenseless against an individual possessing the intention of wreaking mass destruction on the students and staff inside of a school. In 1999, Columbine High School, in Littleton Colorado, experienced a tragedy that holds historic importance to the concept of protecting those inside of a school in a worst case scenario. When thirteen students had their life taken away during a school shooting, the idea of allowing teachers to carry handguns during class received more attention than ever. The safety of the students at school may be at risk, such as the school shootings that occurred at Columbine High School.
Every day eight American children and teenagers die from gun violence. Which totals up to more than 29,00 American children and teens dying each year just in the United States alone. Handguns and other fire arms carried into schools across the country are just waiting to end in disaster. School shootings increase every decade since the 1960s. According to the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education, there were four targeted school shootings in the 1970s, five in the 1980s, twenty-eight in the 1990s, and according to the article “Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings” as of June 1, 2010 there has been twenty-five so far in the 2000s.
Columbine high school massacre. The Columbine High School massacre (often known simply as Columbine) was a school shooting which occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, United States. Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a shooting spree in which a total of 12 students and 1 teacher were murdered. They also injured 21 other students directly, with three further people being injured while attempting to escape the school. The pair then committed suicide.
Gun laws pertaining to schools prevent people from saving more lives and stopping shootings in the making. The Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 goes down in history as the worst school shooting in U.S history. Seung-Hui killed “32 unarmed students on the campus of Virginia Tech” (McGrath), taking his time to go through the building as he “had no expectation that a fellow student or a faculty member might shoot back”(McGrath) thanks to Virginia Tech’s gun-free zone. If Virginia Tech hadn’t had that law, people like Tracy Bridges would have had their guns on them, saving some students that could be alive today “instead of having to sprint to their cars in distant parking lots.” (McGrath).The same happened in1997 when Luke Woodham, then 16, used and action rifle to kill two students and wound seven others at his high school in Pear, Mississippi. Joel Myrick heard the shots and sprinted to get his .45 that was “Prohibited by law” (McGrath) onto campus.
Today there is not a more hotly debated issue than gun control. The most recent school shooting event has prompted an “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more” moment just like it did in Sydney Lumet’s 1976 movie, Network. How many more school shootings do there need to be before the government stops talking about it and steps up and does something about it? It all seems to have started on April 20, 1999, when two high school students who were armed with weapons and bombs entered Columbine High School and killed twelve of their fellow classmates, one teacher and injured many more. On December 14, 2012, a lone gunman killed twenty first graders and six school teachers and administrators with an assault style rifle at the Sandy Hook Elementary School just outside of Newtown, Connecticut (Jonson).
Gun Control On December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, twenty year old Adam Lanza walked into the elementary school with a gun. He shot and killed 26 people, 20 of which were children, using a semi-automatic fire arm. In 2007 at Virginia Tech, a senior at the school, walked into the school and killed 32 people with a semi-automatic weapon. Both of these tragic events were caused by a single gunman with a gun in an educational facility. Both of these events sparked many debates on the topic of guns and how to stop these events from happening.
Technically open carry is allowed, but the state laws prevent open carry in most public situations and areas. Also if a weapon is not unloaded inside a vehicle, the driver and whoever is with them may be have concealed weapons charges. Wisconsin strictly regulates minor access to firearms and other weapons. Like gun owners leaving a weapon where kids under the age of 14 are guilty of a misdemeanor and any person under the age of 18 possessing a weapon faces a Class A misdemeanor charges (Hagy). “There are exceptions, but mostly for hunting purposes, where anyone over the age of 12 is allowed to participate in hunting or any other activities involving only long guns, not handguns, with parental supervision of course” (Hagy).
About nineteen children are hurt from guns every day, in which twelve children are injured and seven children are killed. These are only just children. Imagine how many people become victims of gun violence every day. There is a lot of debate between whether or not more laws should be passed to control the ownership and manufacturing of guns in the United States. Can gun control laws reduce the amount of gun violence?
Shootings in American Schools Introduction In April 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked and killed 12 of their Columbine High school classmates. Since that eventful occasion that shocked the world, cases of school shootings have happened with higher regularity. Since 2000 for instance, there have been over 50 critical school shootings in the U. S as observed by (Hawdon, Oksanen, Rasanen & He, 2012). The office of the Governor (2007) noted that to put the problem of targeted school-based strikes into perspective, from 1993 to 1997, the possibilities that a child between the ages of 9-12 would be confronted or injured with a tool in class were 7 to 8 %.
These kinds of events were not supposed to happen at a simple high school in Colorado. They especially were not supposed to happen at Columbine. The events just described occurred on April 20th, 1999 at Columbine High School. Two high school students possessing illegally obtained guns barged into the high school and opened fire, killing fifteen people including themselves and injuring twenty-four others (Carter, Gun Control: Overview). Up to that point, this was the most significant school shooting massacre in American history.