Tianna Bradford | Staff Writer
As debates and proposed changes to school safety continue, the ideal “safe place” of a school has now turned into a prison-like atmosphere.
Since the Florida Parkland shooting in February, the concern has been on “How can we as a country make schools safer?”
Over the past few weeks, President Trump and other government officials have began discussing how to move forward with solutions on how to ensure safer teaching and learning environments.
Lawmakers have agreed that students and faculty shouldn’t be in continuous fear of dying at the cost innocently learning. However, what some politicians are proposing doesn’t seem to help eliminate that terror.
The newly introduced policy that has now become a widespread debate is the notion allowing faculty to carry weapons on their person or within the building to combat potential threats.
The argument is no longer focused on gun control, but pinpointing the distribution of more weapons to fight off the “bad guys.”
President Trump has openly sided with laws permitting faculty to carry weapons on school grounds.
“These people are cowards,” Trump said during a televised CNN interview.
“They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns — it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that do carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus,” he said.
“They’ll frankly feel more comfortable having the gun anyway. But you give them a little bit of a bonus.”
There are numerous questions that students are asking themselves as this debate deepens: Does my professor really care for my safety? What if he pulls the weapon on me if I’m acting up in class? How much will this affect our student-teacher relationships?
I asked some HU students their thoughts on this life-altering situation.
ShaDarria Dawn, a sophomore biology pre-med major from Dallas, Texas, told how she would feel if HU faculty were allowed to carry weapons around campus for our protection,
“I come a state where gun laws aren’t very strict at all; however, Texas has never felt an utter need to put guns within our schools,” she said.
“Humans are irrational. What if a teacher has a mental breakdown and ends up killing himself with the weapon given to him or kills his class? “
Elijah Banks, a sophomore journalism major from Queens, New York, said that he would not only feel uncomfortable but that he’d feel less safe having teachers “protecting” him.
“I couldn’t imagine being comfortable with my professor walking into class with a gun on his holster,” Banks said.
“I find it beyond me that we have come to this point in America. I would want a weapon for my own protection, especially as a black male. I am constantly looked toward as an aggressor – even by my own people. The last thing myself or any other black student in this country [wants] is for one of us to be killed in class ’cause a teacher ‘felt’ like the student was being too aggressive towards them and the professor has to defend themselves.
Our society has come to the option of allowing our educators to carry weapons in a safe zone for students. With this new policy being implemented, we could end up making schools a factory for mass shooting killers and other acts of violence.
“We are the country with the highest rate of mass shootings. Trump and Congress need to come up with another way … tightening up gun laws, making more of these weapons of mass destruction harder to obtain off black market or even gun shows,” Banks said.
The Hampton Script 