By Per Peterson
Tracy Area High School Supt. Chad Anderson is an avid hunter with a healthy respect for guns. And he can’t even wrap his brain around the prospect of his teachers patrolling the halls of the school with a sidearm.
“For me, it’s difficult to process something like that,” Anderson said. “But I guess 30 years ago it would’ve been difficult for me to process having door locks in the school. I want our schools to have a happy, healthy learning environment and I think we need to be mindful, if we enact more things like officers, or metal detectors or scanners, we start moving away from that.”
At this point in time, Anderson said he is not a proponent of arming teachers.
“I would never want to put a teacher in that position,” he said.
While some schools in the United States do have policies that allow teachers to carry firearms as a way to deter students from plotting a school shooting, that likely won’t be part of most schools’ solutions to the ever-growing epidemic of school shootings. But that’s not to say schools won’t be doing something soon to combat violence and bloodshed on campus, and in Minnesota. Gov. Mark Dayton has taken an aggressive two-pronged approach to address the ongoing problem of gun violence.
For more on this article, see this week’s Headlight-Herald.