School District to let teachers bring guns 3


Yeah, you read right.

In the Daily Briefing Column on the inside front cover of the Boston Globe yesterday (8/16) this chilling headline was the lead:  (Texas) “School district to let teachers bring guns.”


HOUSTON – A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district’s superintendent said yesterday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.  The board of the small rural Harrold Independent School District unanimously approved the plan and parents have not objected, said the district’s superintendent, David Thweatt.  Teachers who wish to bring guns will have to be certified to carry a concealed handgun in Texas and get crisis training and permission from school officials, he said. (Reuters)


This is absolutely chilling and heart-breaking to me.  I  can already hear aficionados of the right to bear arms making the argument that if teachers had guns when either students or outsiders have brought and used weapons into schools they might have thwarted some deaths.  This may be accurate but it still would not justify teachers being able to carry concealed weapons.


I have regretfully accepted that what once seemed sacred ground – schools – have frequently become places of violence.  I have regretfully accepted that police and/or armed security personnel have become a daily presence at many schools.


But teachers carrying guns, this just isn’t right.  No amount of training that teachers could go through would make it enough for me to feel that teachers should have weapons at school.  If one is that afraid of the students, one shouldn’t be working with them.  Go get another job.


I don’t like the idea of people being allowed to carry weapons, concealed or unconcealed, at all. 
I wish that guns would go away and as a species we would evolve to settle differences and process anger in other ways. 
I am not naïve enough to think that this will happen but I must go on record to say that this decision is utter madness and makes me profoundly sad.


I am sad, scared, chilled, and praying, Lord, have mercy, God forgive us for we know not what we do.  During the Civil Right era, Nina Simone sang an anthem, Mississippi God-damn!  I would adapt the refrain from her song to say “and everybody knows about Texas – God-damn!”  I’ll also turn to Marvin, as in Mr. Gaye, “Mercy-Mercy me…Things ain’t what they used to be.”


I truly understand why many people don’t read the paper.  There was a bunch of other crappy news, clogging the front of the paper.  News that can bring an otherwise happy day down, way down.  News that makes me wonder what world do I live in that this happens and only gets a paragraph in the paper.


Have mercy.


About Candelaria Silva

Candelaria Silva-Collins is a marketing, community outreach and programming consultant; writer; and trainer/facilitator who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She has designed and facilitated workshops on a wide variety of topics including communication, facilitation, job search skills, team building, and parenting issues. She currently coordinates the Community Membership Program of the Huntington Theatre Company. Her work as Director of ACT Roxbury was profiled in several publications, including The Creative Communities Builders Handbook. Candelaria’s children’s stories, short stories, essays and reviews have been published in local and national publications and she is an active blogger. Her publications include the booklets, Handling Rejection; Pushing through Shyness: Networking Tips when You’re Shy, Slow to Warm Up or Just don’t Feel you Belong; and Real Questions about Sex & Relationships for Teens: A Discussion Guide for Parents. She has served on the boards of Goddard College, Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston Foundation for Architecture, and Discover Roxbury. She is currently Chair, Designators of the Henderson Foundation.

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3 thoughts on “School District to let teachers bring guns

  • Phillip Martin

    Candelaria –I can’t say that this surprises me. Gun laws in this country are based not on one iota of common sense or real empirical knowledge. It’s purely emotive, so to allow guns in the school in Texas –given its larger culture–is par for the course. –pm

  • LeeAnn

    I remember, after years of homeschooling, taking my children to their first highschool and being stunned, angry, snf having feelings that I can’t find words, when we had to pass through a metal detector to enter A SCHOOL. What does that say about us? Teachers carrying guns? We’re finishing a sentence that I could not begin…and I am horrified. Am I the only one who has grandchildren? What shall become of them? How come no one else is wondering too? Guns! in schools! PERMITTED, not secret, no surrepticiously, but PERMITTED. It seems so impossible…and yet…