Training armed teachers for real-world school shooting scenarios
As educators are asked to stop heavily armed assailants inside their schools, they need formal training and hands-on practice to be capable of ending a school shooting.
Teachers in 33 states—more than half of the country—are allowed to carry guns in their classrooms for the purpose of using deadly force to kill a school shooter. Simply having a weapon is different from being properly trained to stop a heavily armed assailant. In Parkland, FL, the school resource officer and seven of the first deputies to arrive didn’t enter the school. Despite having rifles and body armor, they testified in court that inadequate training for an active shooter hadn’t prepare them to take action.
During Parkland SRO Scot Peterson’s trial, Philip Hayden—a Vietnam veteran who formerly commanded an FBI SWAT team and spent 16 years as an instructor at the FBI Academy—testified about the training necessary for a single officer to stop a school shooter with a rifle:
To train an officer to be a “good tactician and an excellent shot within a distance of 25 yards while an individual is shooting at them with a rifle would take hundreds of hours spent conducting tactical drills and live-fire exercises and thousands of rounds fired on the handgun range every year.”
At a minimum, an armed teacher needs to spend a couple hours every week working one-on-one with an instructor to practice dynamic training scenarios. Firing thousands of rounds each year under the supervision of an experienced tactical firearms instructor ($100/hr for two hours per week) easily exceeds $10,000 per school employee.
And that’s just the bare minimum.
Based on analyzing data from 60 years of school shootings, an armed teacher also needs hands-on training in a wide array of tactical skills to effectively stop an attacker. If local officials and school administrators are going to authorize teachers to use deadly force inside schools, this is the basic training armed teachers need to have:
Firing at moving targets: Most police training and civilian shooting ranges involve standing still and firing at a stationary piece of paper. To find a school shooter inside a large building, a teacher needs to be walking/running while being prepared to fire at a moving target. This requires specialized training. Additionally, an armed teacher needs to practice firing at a moving target while other “no shoot” targets are moving too (simulating a crowded hallway with students fleeing from the attacker).
Room clearing: Half of planned attacks at schools start and end in the same room meaning that an armed teacher needs training in how to quickly enter and scan a room for the assailant. The officers who waited outside in Uvalde said they feared being killed while walking through the classroom door so an armed teacher needs extensive training to overcome this natural fear and to be able to fire faster than the school shooter.
Door breaching: Many schools are mandating that classroom doors are locked and installing slide locks or drop bars that can only be opened from the inside. If an armed teacher hears gunshots from another classroom, they need to be able to get inside to stop the shooter. Opening a locked door requires training in how to use a sledge hammer and pry bar to break the lock.
Counter sniper tactics: Not all school shootings happen inside the school building. Snipers have fired at schools from a distance including coordinated plots to draw the students outside into the line of fire. An armed teacher needs to be trained to recognize where shots are being fired to distinguish a sniper from an active shooter inside the building. To stop a sniper, an armed teacher needs training to identify the sniper’s position (e.g., muzzle flash, triangulation), find cover, conceal position, provide counterfire, and prevent the sniper from moving to another location before police have time to arrive.
Improvised explosive device recognition: School shooting plots often involve bombs and explosives. This week in San Diego, when officers thwarted a school shooting plot they found IEDs and rocket propelled grenades. The Oxford school shooter planned to use Molotov cocktails. Columbine was planned as a bigger bombing than the OKC Federal Building and more than 100 pipe bombs were found inside the school. As an armed teacher searches for a school shooter, they need to be trained to recognize explosive devices. If a teacher shoots at an attacker wearing an explosive suicide vest (happened at an elementary school in Cokeville, WY) this could make the situation even worse.
Hostage situations: Often lost in the focus since 2008 on active shooters is that 43 school shootings since 1966 involve hostages being taken. Half of these hostage situations were peacefully negotiated without any students or staff being shot. An armed teacher needs to be trained to quickly recognize a hostage situation versus an active shooter so that they immediately focus on de-escalating the situation. If an armed teacher rushes towards a hostage taker, this can have a worse outcome.
Psychological conditioning to shoot a child: Most school shooters are current or former students at the school. These shootings most frequently happen in small, rural communities where the teacher may have a personal relationship with the student. A teacher needs specialized training to be capable of firing at one of their students without hesitation. In one tragic example, if the 1st grade teacher in Richneck, VA, was armed, she would need to make a split-second decision to shoot the 6-year-old student with a gun in her classroom.
Consequences of lacking training
If a teacher is given a gun to carry in the classroom without all the training necessary to respond to a school shooting, the consequences can be deadly.
During the intense stress and confusion of the attack, an armed teacher without frequent tactical firearms training may shoot at the wrong person, or miss and strike bystander students.
An armed teacher may encounter bombs and IEDs that they don’t recognize or inadvertently detonate.
An armed teacher rushing toward the attacker may escalate a hostage situation that could have been peacefully negotiated.
If an armed teacher fails to act, they may face criminal or civil litigation for being equipped with a weapon and not using it.
The most important issue for parents and school officials to consider is that teachers are being authorized to use deadly force against their students. This is both a moral and ethical conundrum.
Rather than placing the burden on armed educators to stop attacks, school shootings can be prevented before a student brings a gun to campus. We need to focus on spotting the warning signs, empowering students to report problems, implementing crisis intervention programs in every community, securing firearms in the home, and resolving conflicts before they escalate to gun violence.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.