I'm a Tennessee parent and educator. The heroic teacher with a gun ideal is a myth

Many of you know the feeling – a teacher lost their cool, shamed you, punished you, or perhaps paddled you.

They were, of course, underpaid and overworked, maybe with no mentorship or beyond burnt out.

I can recall at the tender age of 5 a teacher grabbing me and shaking me by my wrists for a minor lack of immediate compliance.

Many teachers are headed towards sainthood, but we all make mistakes. As an educator, parent, and mental health clinician, I have seen a bit of everything and know that human impulses often get the best of us.

Now, imagine with me for a moment a gun at a teacher's side loaded with bullets that can’t be taken back. With the No. 1 cause of childhood death in Tennessee being gun violence, we have to take a step back and consider: What is best for the child?

Counterpoint: These Tennessean readers support allowing teachers to be armed in the classroom

In schools across the country, firearms are not secured

Picture a curious 5 year old or a couple of knuckleheaded teenagers at your local school. What would have been a little kid's curiosity at something else is now a gun that someone accidentally forgot to lock, leading to a life altering mistake.

What would have been a foolish boyhood fistfight is now a bullet wound, a teacher that can no longer live with themselves, and a devastated family and community.

With the trauma Nashville has been through with The Covenant School shooting, there is compassion for our love of the hero narrative: a teacher stopping an unspeakable tragedy of a school shooting, but there is much more likelihood of potential mistakes, misses, lapses in judgment at the least – intended harm at the worst.

We have repeated evidence of these errors in judgment in our country: a teacher's gun falling out of the holster on a bus and found by a student, a Florida teacher’s loaded gun falling from his waistband during a cartwheel, a Texas vice principal leaving a gun unattended in the restroom, a California teacher unintentionally firing a gun in class during a safety demonstration, a firearm discharging when a Michigan student tried to take it from a safety officer, to name a few.

Just recently we saw an armed teacher threatening to shoot another teacher in an altercation at a preschool in Nashville.

Irrationality comes in waves and often ends in irreversible regret. The evidence shows us that having armed individuals on campus does not decrease the rates of injuries in school involved shootings and can actually increase aggression with many school shooters aiming for death by return fire due to suicidality.

Tennessee policies should be pro-children, no pro-gun

Fear and the broken parts of our humanity leads us to do wild things. But the reality is that when we feel emotionally and psychologically calm, we are better able to work together to make decisions that lead to productive outcomes for our community vs reacting to violence with plans for violence.

Perfect emotional and psychological calm and clarity in a room of thirty 13 year olds is impossible to maintain every day of the year (those of you with just one teenager know this well).

Instead, could we consider creating a community of support and safety where youth that are struggling are noticed and supported before they even consider purchasing a weapon?

Could we instead imagine parents and teachers receiving tangible support in their role of child development that they use all day long instead of wasting resources on teaching them how to fire a weapon with a prayer they might just be in the right place, at the right time, with really good aim, and practice 100% infallible firearm safety?

The parents' voices of distress could be heard this month outside the chamber of our elected officials, but the voices of the children that we have lost are no longer able to speak.

Can our elected officials find it within them to represent the voices of the parents, teachers, and children in Nashville or do we continue with one grave mistake after another?

As a community that espouses loving one another we must be pro-children in our policy and advocacy. We must rely on actual evidence of potential outcomes based on experts on child safety and development – not on our opinion or false hope for a fallible human hero.

We all know that teachers and parents can be the real heroes in vulnerable kids' lives if they are equipped with education, resources, emotional support, healthcare, and a voice.

Kara Birch is a parent, educator and mental health professional in Tennessee.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee teachers gun bill: New law will put children in danger