Teachers should not be required to sacrifice their lives so their students can be easily killed also.

If it is true that one of a teacher’s responsibilities is to provide a safe learning environment, a motivated, trained, equipped, armed teacher can do that better than an unarmed, hiding teacher. There are many ways to secure and/or conceal an adequate size pistol so students and parents are unaware of it.

Not all teachers can or should handle this responsibility this way. The vast majority of US citizens are unwilling to defend themselves or others. However, being a teacher should not automatically mean someone who values life and wants to return home each night to his or her family should be denied that choice.

If your profession means more to you than your (or others’) life, go willingly to “gun free zones” with the mistaken belief they are safe. They are not.

If your life is more important than your profession, work where you can be armed. It’s a choice. I know many teachers and administrators who are armed every day here, and no one is upset about it. If someone doesn’t like that fact, they can try to find a gun free school, but they would be hard pressed to find one around here.

As the recent shooting shows, being armed is not enough. Being willingly is even more important, and there are different levels of willingness. Unfortunately, the most effective willingness is to attack the shooter to stop the killing. There is an element of fighting sacrifice here that most people today just do not have.

Most people today have never killed anything—not a chicken, a deer, or a bear. We are insulated from killing. It is now foreign and we are trained to abhor it. However, each of us participates in killing things every day. We just pretend we don’t because we are “civilized”.

The problem is, the few criminals and deranged people aren’t civilized. We have outlawed all sorts of evil acts and some of the devices used to commit them. This symptomatic legislation may deter some, but not all. When true evil breaks upon us, an equal or greater force for good must be applied to stop it, and time is measured in seconds, not even minutes.

There are still a few in society willing to get training, be armed, and maybe even sacrifice themselves for others. But, they are very few.

Society has provided all the excuses necessary to let someone (or something) else take responsibility for our lives. Sometimes, however, those others fail their duty or cannot perform it until too late.

We can choose to be our own First Responders. Or not.