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| Teachers in Utah at a training session that would allow them to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. In the wake of school shootings, some elected officials have called for teachers to keep firearms in their classrooms to ward off assailants. George Frey/Getty Images |
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Before the United States Marine Corps allowed me to carry a live
M-16 assault rifle, I went through hundreds of hours of firearms training.
Classroom sessions devoted to nomenclature, maintenance and basic operation accounted
for more than two weeks of study before I even set eyes on ammunition. For
weeks, I carried an M-16 without a magazine — a dummy weapon, basically. I
secured it with a padlock overnight while I slept in the barracks, and unlocked
it each morning before chow.
Only at the shooting range was I allowed to check out magazines
and ammo from the armory. The first day at the range I spent 12 hours
disassembling, cleaning and reassembling the weapon. I had to do this
blindfolded. I had to do this while a drill instructor hurried me, yelling that
enemies were at the gate. I had to do this while fellow Marines wept nearby
from doing hundreds of burpees as punishment for not being able to reassemble
their weapons fast enough.
The military issue M-16 is the model for the AR-15 assault rifle
that the accused shooter used to kill 17 people this month at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The shooter bought the weapon lawfully.
He received zero hours of mandated training. There is no reason that any
civilian, of any age, should possess this rifle.
At the White House on Wednesday, President Trump suggested that
if a football coach at the high school, Aaron Feis, had been armed, he would
have saved even more lives than he did, perhaps even his own, because rather
than simply shielding students from gunfire, he could have drawn his weapon,
fired and killed the assailant — putting a tidy end to the rampage.
This is absurd. More likely, had Mr. Feis been armed, he would
not have been able to draw his weapon (a side arm, presumably) quickly enough
to stop the shooter, who with an AR-15 would have had the coach outgunned. Even
if the coach had been able to draw his weapon — from where? his athletic
shorts? — any shots he managed to fire would have risked being errant, possibly
injuring or killing additional students. As some studies have shown, even
police officers have missed their targets more than 50 percent of the time. In
firing a weapon, Mr. Feis would have only added to the carnage and confusion.
What if a history teacher had also been armed? And an English
teacher, and a math teacher, and the janitorial staff members? In this National
Rifle Association fever dream, a high school would concentrate so much firepower
in the hands of its employees that no deranged individual with a weapon would
dare enter the premises.
This sort of thinking also has no grounding in
reality. People attack heavily armed institutions all too often, as with the
mass shootings in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas and in 2013 at the Washington Navy
Yard. Assailants in such cases aren’t typically worried about losing their
lives in the process. Usually, losing their lives is part of the plan.
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