Would arming De Anza College professors with firearms and giving them gun training make the campus safer?
Maybe, or maybe not, but educators in Utah are willing to give it a shot.
That’s right, instead of spending their holidays shopping and enjoying time with family, 200 educators in Utah were enrolled in classes, learning how to handle a gun.
CNN confirms that full-time teachers, substitutes and secretaries are given the option to take the free “session” and roughly 200 of them decided to attend.
After the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, Wayne LaPierre, vice president of the National Rifle Association had issued a statement saying that, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” as stated on a New York Times article.
He also talked about a possible program the NRA would develop to arm and train schools, calling it the National Model School Shield Program.
All this talk about guns, and more guns, comes after the tragedy that visited Sandy Hook Elementary, in New Town, Conn.
On Dec. 14, 2012, 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother and drove to Sandy Hook Elementary, where he killed six faculty members and 20 children.
As people tried to grasp how something that terrible could have happened, debates about gun control have sky rocketed.
Though people want more gun control and would urgue the White House to push this issue through Congress if they could, the NRA has not offered any support for any new measures of gun control.  
According to an article from the New York Times, when reporters asked whether or not the NRA would work with Barack Obama on gun-control proposals, both LaPierre and David Keene, the president of the NRA, “walked off stage without answering.”
Actions speak louder than words, right?
Banning guns would go against the Second Amendment right to bear arms, but arming teachers with guns may not be the golden answer either.
Sources said Lanza was mentally ill when he decided to gun down his 27 victims, although former FBI profiler, Mary Ellen O’Toole would disagree.
In an article written by Jason Sickles, published on Yahoo! News, O’Toole wrote “The way Lanza carried out his killings suggested a high measure of control.”
From the crashing of his computer hard drives to choosing harmless children as his victims, O’Toole said those choices were “security measures” that assured Lanza that “he wouldn’t be stopped.”
She may not totally be on point with her statement, but it is one worth looking over.
Why Lanza did what he did is a mystery but another question to consider is why would he decide to target kids, in a school that has no connection to his mother, or him?
Going back to arming De Anza faculty, should students be okay with knowing that their professor has a concealed weapon somewhere near-by?
“Well, I don’t agree with it. Unless they’re permitted to carry it on their person,” said De Anza alumnus, Nate Peralta.
“Having a gun on campus in a secured spot could pose a threat because it could backfire and be used against the campus,” he said.
Instead, Peralta said he thinks that having armed security on campuses would probably be a better option and would also help create jobs in the process.
Hiring armed professionals sounds like a win-win situation, one that would probably work better than training teachers to use a weapon.
Arming teachers may sound like a good idea, but many thingsshould be considered.
For instance, a teacher’s first priority in Code Red is to make sure students are safe.
The pressure of whether to make sure their students are safely barricaded or to hold a gun to the door in case the shooter comes through may not go as intended.
After all it’s one thing to practice and drill procedures, but it is an entirely different thing to actually take action in a real life or death situation.
A teacher could totally freak out.