Within the first 23 days of 2018, there were 11 school shootings in the United States. In lieu of any serious discussion about gun control, there has been instead a proliferation of laws and bills that would arm teachers, and train them to be able to kill. Observes Adam Skaggs, of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “it’s the idea that people need guns everywhere—city streets, public parks, even government buildings.” It’s also the response of a nation at war with itself.
One example of the trend is the Buckeye Firearms Foundation’s funding of so-called “Faster” programs, three-day training sessions for teachers from around the country. In addition to target practice, one day of the training is devoted to “mindset development,” or bolstering teachers’ preparedness to shoot after split-second assessments. Trainees are asked “to close their eyes and imagine the student entering the classroom with a gun” and then are taught how to command the grit necessary to kill that student. One teacher from Colorado told the BBC that “she decided to picture her favourite student during the preparation exercises, in an effort to harden herself to the worst possible eventuality.” A Faster instructor was quite encouraging of such resolve: “if we can have them win in their minds first, against that student, then when it comes to the actual incident they will prevail.”
What an astounding proposition, this tragic lesson about winning “in their minds first, against that student….” This adherence to a toxic shoot-‘em-up Wild West ethic puts teachers in a clear bind: They must labor from the untenable position of actively imagining their students in the crosshairs, the objects of target practice. If this isn’t the end of civilization, I don’t know what is.
Deputizing teachers as locked-and-loaded “peace” officers speaks volumes about how challenged police are by the quotidian nature of gun violence. It should make us ponder how much democratic assumptions about the state having a monopoly on violence have been frayed by anarchic ideologies of “every man for himself.” And it brings that us-versus-them mentality into the classroom. The Colorado teacher imagined her favorite student; I’m guessing that many would imagine their worst student, or some stereotype of dangerous otherness. Either way, the imaginative act of seeing the best as worst and the worst as expendable is a separate danger in itself—a premeditated license to shoot faster, ever faster…
In the United States, more than half the population believes that having a gun enhances the chances of survival in a world overrun by gangs of terrorists. But data shows very conclusively that gun ownership is much more likely to increase the risk of harm. Research shows, as Slate notes, “a gun in the home was far more likely to be used to threaten a family member or intimate partner than to be used in self-defense.” According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, not only is “[t]he risk of homicide…three times higher in homes with firearms,” but in addition, “[k]eeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of suicide by a factor of 3 to 5 and increases the risk of suicide with a firearm by a factor of 17.” There is no reason to suppose that such figures wouldn’t apply to gun-centered classrooms.