Hardcore opponents of gun control in the U.S. often respond to school shootings by proposing to arm teachers or add armed security guards to schools. But the inability of police to stop the gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, before he killed at least 19 children and two teachers Tuesday exposes the poor reasoning behind that proposal.
While all the details of the shooting are not yet clear, authorities’ accounts revealed that the gunman was confronted by multiple armed police officers — yet they were unable to stop him before he killed nearly two dozen people.
If a group of police officers couldn’t stop a shooter, then why would we expect an individual teacher or security guard to do better?
The gunman reportedly crashed his truck in a ditch near the campus before entering the school, and police officers arrived at the school after a report of that crash.
According to CBS News’ summary of Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Christopher Olivarez’s account, the shooter “stormed Robb Elementary School in the small city of Uvalde shortly after crashing his car in the area and immediately engaged in gunfire with state troopers on the scene. The gunman shot several police officers and then locked himself in a classroom.”
Olivarez told NBC’s “TODAY” show that the gunman’s shooting of police officers prompted them to break windows around the school to evacuate children and teachers.
According to various reports, after local officers called for backup, a specialized tactical unit made it into the classroom a full hour after the gunman entered the school, and an agent of an elite law enforcement unit was involved in killing the gunman. (That agent was injured in the process.)
Given those details, I find it increasingly impossible to understand how one could believe that the solution to school shootings is arming teachers or having a security guard protecting every school. If a group of police officers couldn’t stop a shooter, then why would we expect an individual teacher or security guard to do better?
Police officers have been professionally trained to use firearms, and their job entails being ready for life-and-death crises. Responding to a shooting is part of what they’re expected to do, by virtue of their role, which means they should be expected to be better at handling such a crisis than the overwhelming majority of the population. Yet police on the scene Tuesday sustained injuries, apparently had to deal with the issue somewhat defensively and ultimately needed a specialized tactical unit to confront the gunman. Most crucially, those police officers were unable to prevent the gunman from exacting a massive death toll.
Getting past the police and killing at least 21 people inside the school was made easier because the man who perpetrated all this had lethal weapons that are meant for killing with ease: an AR-15 assault weapon, a handgun and high-capacity magazines, CBS News reported. And he had the willingness to use those weapons to maximum effect.
How could we expect a teacher — whose job it is to educate children, not protect them from highly motivated armed murderers — to handle the job more effectively in a moment of shocking chaos and terror? At best, supplying a teacher with a gun to confront a shooter is a mandate to have them sacrifice themselves while likely doing little to stop the attack; at worst, the teacher could accidentally harm or kill children, or even be mistaken for the shooter by responding officers.
An armed security guard faces grim odds as well. Mass shootings are not duels; they are ambushes. The element of surprise and war-like weaponry will always give the attacker an advantage. Consider that in the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, this month, authorities said the gunman exchanged fire with an armed security guard before the guard died. The gunman arrived at the store with a semiautomatic assault-style weapon and wore a tactical helmet and body armor, they said. Pointing out the futility of expecting teachers to fight back against people bent on mass murder doesn’t even address the likelihood of accidental discharges of weapons, the increased risk to children that accompanies having guns stored in schools or the social cost of further militarizing public spaces by having armed guards patrol every school. Remarkably, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, said Tuesday that a solution was to “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance.” In other words, he’s floating the idea that schools should completely rebuild their architecture in ludicrously impractical and dangerous ways (what about emergency exits?) while doing nothing to address the reality that one entrance won’t be any harder to get through if someone is armed to the teeth. The real issue is that America’s shelves are stocked with a shockingly high number of guns that are designed to kill huge numbers of people with extreme efficiency. We have few safeguards for ensuring that these guns are not grabbed up or held by people inclined to use them for murder, and we have a polity incapable of tackling the question of how to regulate civilian access to and possession of these weapons. Despite their best efforts, police officers couldn’t stop the gunman in Uvalde before he took many lives. There’s little reason to believe an armed teacher would have halted his brutal slaughter.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
