Teachers Don’t Want Guns in Their Classrooms

In 1997, Joel Myrick, then an assistant principal at a Mississippi high school, used his personal pistol, which he kept in his truck, to stop a 16-year-old school shooter with a rifle. Even Myrick—one of the extremely rare cases of an armed teacher intervening in a school shooting—says that arming teachers is a terrible idea. 

Teachers in Texas agree. A new report from the Texas American Federation of Teachers, which represents 66,000 current and retired school staff, shows that the overwhelming majority of educators in Texas do not support state leaders’ recent calls to put guns in their hands. 

The union sent out a survey to thousands of school staff and parents to gauge the consensus, in the wake of the catastrophic failure of law enforcement to stop the killing of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde last month. Seventy-seven percent of the school employees who responded to the survey said they do not want to be armed or to have the responsibility of stopping a shooter. “Teachers overwhelmingly know that this isn’t something that they signed up for,” said Rob D’Amico, spokesperson for Texas AFT. “They’re not trained to be what in essence is a police officer.”