At the end of May 2022, the Uvade massacre in Texas – 21 dead including 19 children – plunged the United States into mourning, without surprising as the issue of shootings and mass killings are sadly common in the country. Also, schools organize exercises to prepare children for the possibility of an attack. Another response is to let school staff have a gun at work. This is the case in about fifteen American states, including Utah, where the sheriff’s office has set up appropriate training.
>> Mass shootings in the United States are more and more frequent and the victims are more and more numerous
During these twenty hours spread over six weeks, set up since 2019, it is for example a question of learning first aid for a child victim of gunshots, or how to try to deter an armed attacker. And then, of course, shooting at targets, or even providing self-defense lessons to disarm the assailant and neutralize him.
To complete these exercises, sessions with the VirTra V-300 are planned. It is a great simulator, already used to train law enforcement. Faced with five very large 300-degree screens that broadcast different immersive scenarios, such as a sequence where the shooter is in the school library, this allows you to learn to react quickly and well, as much as possible in real-life conditions. .
One of the arguments of the sheriff Mike Smith in charge of this training, it is that in Utah, the staff has the right to have a weapon in the school. So learn how to use it. A news item had yet made people talk: 8 years ago, a teacher had accidentally shot herself in the leg in the toilets of a primary school. She had to resign from the establishment immediately.
Since school shootings break out regularly in America, the sheriff has another very pragmatic argument in favor of his training: “Everyone hopes nothing will happen but hope is a very bad strategyhe said. Teachers have the right not to be victims and they have the right to protect our children“, still assures Sheriff Smith.
However, this non-compulsory training is today only given to a very small percentage of the teaching staff, but enough, in any case, for the training to have a waiting list.
If, in 2019, 95% of the 3,000 teachers surveyed by a Los Angeles university across the country said they did not want a weapon in the classroom, in June 2022, in the Los Angeles Times, a retired teacher, reacted in a forum to a law in Ohio which aims to arm teachers. And he doesn’t even ask himself the question of whether or not to face a shooter in a school: the presence of a weapon is the real danger. What will an armed teacher do in a tense situation, if a pupil threatens him or if he himself argues with a colleague, for example? Or if he doesn’t realize that a gun-toting teenager actually just wanted to show off in front of the buddies by bringing a toy to school? “If we have to arm ourselves, writes this teacher, instead, empower us to support children with mental or behavioral issues.”