It seems that schoolworkers want guns and gun training.

Watching the news and reading the paper and you are barraged with endless quotes from the public, teachers and teacher union officials united that guns will not penetrate the sacred halls of academia.  They are, after all, "gun free zones" in which only a deranged killer can carry a gun.  And that's the way it should be according to the press.  Yet given the choice, and not much noted in the press (except to mock), teachers are lining up for gun training so that they will not end up as soft, ineffective shields between their children and the next nut who has a grudge against his classmates or his mother.   

 

In Columbus Ohio Scores of school workers want gun training

More than 450 teachers and other school employees from across Ohio have applied for 24 spots in a free firearms-training program being offered by the Buckeye Firearms Association.

“We’re pleasantly surprised, but it’s not shocking,” Ken Hanson, legal chairman for the association, said yesterday of the response since the group began taking applications on its website 10 days ago. “The demand has been there for quite some time.”

 

In Utah  More than 150 Utah teachers, school workers go to gun class

More than 150 Utah teachers and school workers took time off from their winter breaks Thursday to attend a free class on how to carry concealed weapons and respond to mass violence such as the recent shooting in a Connecticut elementary school.

It’s a course that’s been offered to Utah educators for more than a decade, but Thursday it attracted about 10 times as many people as usual, said Clark Aposhian, an instructor with Fairwarning Training and a chairman of the Utah Shooting Sports Council, which hosted the class with OPSGEAR. Aposhian said organizers had to turn away about 40 or 50 people for lack of space.

How did that work out in the past? Here's what happend in the San Diego area in 2001

The student's attack began with a shotgun blast through the windows of a California high school. Rich Agundez, the El Cajon policeman assigned to the school, felt his mind shift into overdrive.

People yelled at him amid the chaos but he didn't hear. He experienced "a tunnel vision of concentration."

While two teachers and three students were injured when the glass shattered in the 2001 attack on Granite Hills High School, Agundez confronted the assailant and wounded him before he could get inside the school and use his second weapon, a handgun.

In the rest of the country:

—Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio says he has the authority to mobilize private citizens to fight crime and plans to post armed private posse members around the perimeter of schools. He said he hasn't spoken to specific school districts and doesn't plan to have the citizen posse members inside the buildings.

—The Snohomish School District north of Seattle got rid of its school officers because of the expense.

—The Las Vegas-based Clark County School District has its own police department and places armed officers in and around its 49 high school campuses. Officers patrol outside elementary and middle schools. The Washoe County School District in Nevada also has a police force, but it was only about a decade ago that the officers were authorized to carry guns on campus.

—In Milwaukee, a dozen city police officers cover the school district but spend most of their time in seven of the 25 high schools. In Madison, Wis., an armed police officer has worked in each of the district's four high schools since the mid-1990s.

—For the last five years, an armed police officer has worked in each of the two high schools and three middle schools in Champaign, Ill. Board of Education member Kristine Chalifoux said there are no plans to increase security, adding, "I don't want our country to become an armed police state."

Ed Massey, vice chairman of the Boone County, Ky., school board and president of the National School Boards Association, said his district has nine trained law enforcement officers for 23 schools and "would love to have one in every school."

"They bring a sense of security and have done tremendous work in deterring problems in school," he said. "The number of expulsions have dramatically decreased. We used to have 15 or 20 a year. Now we have one or two in the last three years."

An officer, he said, "is not just a hired gun. They have an office in the school. They are trained in crisis management, handling mass casualties and medical emergencies."

 

It seems that Big Media may be out of step with the public.  Of course that's not news.

UPDATE:  Tennessee lawmakers are also on board.

Measures that would bring more police officers into schools and allow teachers to be armed appear to be gaining momentum among Tennessee lawmakers in the wake of last month’s shooting in Newtown, Conn.