After the recent school shooting in Florida which left 17 dead, the American public are roaring for a solution. Some are advocating for a total ban on civilian use of weapons. Others advocate for bans on assault weapons; Then there are others who advocate that teachers should have the option to carry a gun in school. The latter is the most logical solution to preventing mass shootings in classrooms.

“If you had a teacher who was adept with the firearm, they could end the attack very quickly,” President Trump stated in a press conference on February 21.

The support for teachers carrying guns in school has quickly grown as the choice of banning guns will obviously never happen. The consideration of arming teachers won’t force a teacher to carry a gun, it just allows teachers to have the option.

In the state of Nevada, schools are left with the option of whether they would like to arm teachers. In Clark County, they must seek approval from school police. In countries such as Israel, there are heavily armed forces guarding schools. The ability to implement this in U.S. schools isn’t as easy due to the amount of schools in the U.S. The fact is that arming every school won’t fit in the education budget.

The next best thing to placing armed forces in each school is to arm the teachers themselves. Twenty-four states ranging from California to Texas, allow some form of permission, whether it’s up to the superintendent or the principal.

Put yourself in a scenario where a gunman has entered your school. The national average police response time in the U.S. is 18 minutes. In 18 minutes, in a gun-free campus, an armed perpetrator has plenty of time to commit a massacre. Imagine if at least 20 percent of the teachers on that campus were armed. The death toll would either severely decrease, as there would now be a possible chance for the gunman to be stopped short of his massacre, or potentially no deaths at all.

Even if a law was passed that required every single seller of  weapon to do a background check of every consumer they sold to, it would still not have stopped shooters. Nikolas Cruz who was responsible for the Parkland, Florida school shooting, did not have a criminal past barring him from purchasing a weapon.

In a wild dream if guns were completely banned from civilian use, what’s to stop a mad man from acquiring a gun illegally? Just take a gander at Chicago and their extreme rate of homicide and gun related crimes. The gun control laws in Chicago are one of the strictest in the U.S., so how do they have one of the largest issues with gun related crimes?

The black market and the deep web are places where someone could purchase a gun with no background check, no communication between the buyer and seller, and just a clean gun for cash type of deal. Criminals do not care about the laws, so the only type of people who would cough up their weapons if they were to become illegal would be good Samaritans.

The best way to combat or prevent school shootings from happening are to allow teachers
to carry a gun on campus. The chances of stopping a perpetrator are much greater, it could decrease deaths and would work with the struggling education budget.