The most frightening moment of my life was when I huddled in a corner smushed between other students in a dark classroom. After a real lockdown was bellowed over the P.A. system and hearing creaks in the hallway, the one thing on my panicked mind was preserving safety in that moment. Looking back, the one thing that would have made that experience worse was to see my shaky math teacher ready to fire a loaded gun.

School teachers, no matter their background or training, should not be armed in the possible event of a school shooting. Guns have no place in the hands of educators in class.

On average, school shootings take place within a span of six minutes. In that short amount of time, many things can go wrong if a teacher had a gun.

If there were to be an emergency in the school, the teacher with the gun would be expected to go after the shooter. This creates a catch-22 situation. Do we expect the teacher to go and try to prevent the deaths of others or protect their own students and not leave them vulnerable? An ethical dilemma presents itself here, and this train of thought should not be considered during a life or death situation.

Not only would this hypothetical teacher be dealing with protecting others, they would have to deal with their own panic. Imagine an adult with trembling hands, gripping a locked and loaded gun near young children. That teacher’s finger could accidentally slip and shoot a bullet, injuring an innocent child and giving away their location to a shooter.

After the six minutes of the shooting has elapsed, the authorities would need to clear out the building. What will they think when they see someone with a gun? They could be mistaken for the assailant, prompting an even more devastating event. According to Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, responding law enforcement could retaliate in this situation.

Teachers with guns create a more harmful environment than safe. And it’s not only teachers and organizations against this notion as well; it’s students. Isabela Barry, a survivor of the Parkland shooting, believes that arming teachers fights fire with fire and the safety of students would not change. Also, in a poll answered by Herricks students on whether or not they would feel safe knowing that any of their teachers had a gun in school, a whopping 86.4% responded no. The lives at risk are the students and they are overwhelmingly saying no to arming teachers.

Despite this, many adults still feel that arming teachers is the best course of action to prevent school shootings, including President Donald Trump. The thought behind this is that trained teachers can act as the first line of defense in schools. However, no matter how trained a teacher could be in handling firearms, accidents happen. In California, a teacher discharged his firearm while in class, injuring a teenage student. Anyone can easily gain access to the teacher’s weapon and cause unnecessary damage, as it already has in school districts across America. Also, teachers with a pistol stand no chance against a shooter with an AR-15 and the strategic upperhand.

So what can we do? The middle ground would be hiring school resource officers or police officers with guns to solely protect the school. But this isn’t the best idea. MSD High School in Parkland had an SRO, but he did not go into action to save lives as a shooter killed 17 people. In Pittsburgh, a security guard in Ringgold High School dropped their gun in the student bathroom where it was retrieved by a child. The occupation of guns in schools makes it easier for these weapons to get into the wrong hands.

What we really need is common sense gun control. Make guns less accessible to those with suspicious backgrounds. Treat the obtainment of a gun the same way you would treat getting your driver’s license. To achieve this goal, we need to speak up. Call people in government. Talk to your school administrators. Vote for those who will fight for you. We deserve to be heard. We deserve to be represented. We deserve to be safe.