Yes, because we all know the best way to educate someone is to make them fear for their life. :roll:
I was largely in agreement with you throughout your post, particularly the above section and the statement that it changes the dynamic between student and teacher in a negative way.
I am nervously skeptical about firearms in schools, including in the hands of SROs, other staff members, or even teachers. Firearms are, largely, an unknown commodity in the school system, so the impact may be a net positive, a net negative, a neutral decision, or an impact (positive or negative) in discrete categories. Given that school shootings, stabbings, and so forth are
incredibly rare, when introducing a solution that will be ever-present regardless of the condition of a given school, we must consider how that one variable may influence scores of additional situations.
This is why I think even the SROs are a huge double-edged sword. On one hand they were absolutely needed in the wake of incredibly large school shootings. Further, the presence of some of these officers instilled a positive relationship between students and police, or, rather youth to authority figure. They were meant to be two separate institutions cooperating for the greater good of school safety. On the other hand, our data has shown that schools have too readily and too easily blurred the lines between police and school administrative or management tasks. As a result, the number of negative encounters, penalties, and criminal records skyrocketed, often for things that should have strictly been in the domain of school-only personnel and quietly dealt with just as in the past. In another somewhat separate solution, when the utilization of seclusion and restraints was (or is) allowed, we have data showing how those techniques became standard operating procedure for
everything, even if we know it was used against commonly accepted "evidence-based practices." When a student was "non-compliant" (a term so vague and subjective it often describes anything an authority figure in the school doesn't like), escalation tactics were readily employed. These could often, and did, endanger a student's life. I know such students by name who were luckily alive after the encounter, but they could have died right there for something that posed no danger to self or other. Introducing a new variable that can be used to assure or insure compliance can be easily abused or lead to situations in which one party or the other (i.e. the student) escalates the situation into a fatal encounter. Without the firearm, the situation may have inappropriately escalated because of the staff member or the student, but we have a much greater chance that both parties are going to be able to come home alive after that. I really don't want our society to turn into a place where a kid may or may not come home alive, because they were shot and killed over an escalated situation that started from something as innocuous as a dress code violation. We already have too much escalation in our schools over stuff like that. There's frankly no way we should be needing to worry about whether or not the introduction of firearms will have the same kind of consequences that the mere introduction of an SRO has had on in-school arrests and so on. Sadly, whenever we have introduced new mechanisms or permissions to schools in order to address a perceived crisis, we have in turn created other crises or social problems which show themselves in far greater instances or impacts than the tools were meant to solve.