Texas Governor Rick Perry has officially came out in favor of this nonsense (more):

Gov. Rick Perry has said he supports the policy because "there's a lot of incidents where that would have saved a number of lives."

Plus, it is getting a lot of national media attention ... particularly from conservative sources. For instance, here is a 7 min. spot on Fox News' Fox and Friends. Two of the "friends" (I don't know or care about their names) strenuously defended the policy - in fact they seemed to be arguing for guns in EVERY school.

This is stupid, stupid, stupid. Seriously, one of the dumbest ideas I have heard since I started working in education nearly a decade ago. But, with the attention and support we are seeing for this from conservative sources, it looks more and more like this is not going to go away quietly, like I had hoped. 

So, we need to get proactive against this right now and head this off from becoming a major national debate.

There were 20 (TWENTY!) children deaths due to law enforcement intervention in the year 1999. It is the job of law enforcement to handle weapons and still children die. In the same year, there were 214 unintentional gun related deaths of children. Guns make places less safe. The American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that guns in the home do NOT make it safer. In fact,

guns kept in the home are 43 times more likely to be used to kill someone known to the family than to be used to kill in self-defense.

Guns in the hands of teachers is a bad idea. I shouldn't need to cite statistics to make that point, but I will if I have to. I think education law folks need to be checking the statutes in all their states and helping legislators introduce legislation prohibiting any persons that primarily work with students from carrying guns. This is one of those times when I guess we are just going to have to codify common sense.