“What teachers should have in their hands should be chalk, books, rulers and markers — certainly not guns,” said Nafisat Aliyu, a mother of three boys in Maiduguri, Borno state, where Boko Haram was formed. She said impressionable young kids may see their teachers carrying firearms and decide they want to try one for themselves. “Armed teachers can be as dangerous as having some crazy fellow running into the school with a blazing gun.”
The threat to students at school in northeast Nigeria has had devastating consequences. Nearly 1,400 primary and junior secondary schools have been destroyed in Borno state by Boko Haram insurgents, according to UNICEF and Borno government statistics. A total of 2,295 teachers have been killed since 2009. Schools were closed for about 40 months in the region, and even today, 52 percent of children are not attending school.
In Parkland, Florida, 17 people were killed last month at Stoneman Douglas High School and some of its students have become outspoken gun-control advocates. They’ve been vocal in opposition to arming their teachers as a policy response. The students have used rallies and media appearances to call for stricter laws on guns, including a new Florida measure to raise the minimum age to buy rifles to 21 from 18.
On Wednesday, tens of thousands of young students held a walkout at schools across the United States, leaving class for 17 minutes in honor of the 17 killed in Parkland.
“We go to school to learn, to get an education, to prepare for the future, but with these school shootings happening, we are scared to come to school,” said Leila Montgomery, a 10th-grader at Atlanta’s Druid Hills High School, who called for society-wide measures like better background checks and an assault weapons ban. “We are afraid things will happen.”
The debate is also playing out in Washington as Trump, in his school safety proposal released this week, pledged to help states pay for firearms training for teachers. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has also said that schools and communities that want to arm their teachers should have that option.
After the Parkland shooting, Trump said designating schools as gun-free zones was like “an invitation for these very sick people to go there.” He argued it made sense to discreetly arm “a small portion” of teachers who “are very gun-adept, that truly know how to handle it.”
