After the Parkland High shooting on February in Florida, several members of Congress have suggested plans to prevent further school shootings from occurring. President Trump, offering the most controversial plan, proposed that teachers should be armed to protect students from on-campus intruders. This plan is very dangerous and could backfire in many ways.

“It doesn’t matter what a pistolero (gunfighter) you are, or think you are. You don’t need to be in school in charge of protecting children,” the former assistant principal at a high school in Mississippi,  Joel Myrick said in an interview with The New York Times.

Many people believe a teacher’s only job should be to teach. They believe that it would be inappropriate to ask a teacher to hold a gun on campus because it would imply that the teacher would have to play the role of a police officer in the event of a shooting.

Not only would it be a burden on the teachers, but arming teachers may backfire on the students, causing the danger to come from the teachers themselves. A potential risk that could arise from this plan would be if racist teachers get a hold of a gun. In fact, recently, a teacher aide got arrested for bringing a gun to school and potentially endangering students.

“How long would it be, if Trump’s plan became reality, before a teacher shoots a black student and then invokes the ‘I feared for my life’ defense we continually hear from police officers who misinterpret young black people’s behavior with deadly consequences?” Stacey Patton of the Washington Post said.

If a teacher were to accidentally leave his/her gun out in the open without putting it in a safe place or somewhere protective, and an irresponsible student were to get ahold of the gun, people could get seriously injured or even killed.

The plan is also too impractical, as only teachers with adept firearm training would be given guns to protect themselves and their students. There may not be many people with adept firearm training that would be willing to become teachers so this plan would be very hard to implement.

While arming teachers may seem like a good idea theoretically, in reality, it is a very dangerous idea that could end up doing more harm than good by increasing gun violence. Arming teachers would be a huge step backwards in the process of making schools completely safe from gun violence. Instead, there are smarter ways to prevent gun violence.