On the pro-gun arguments:
1)The Canada thing is rubbish. Canada has roughly half the gun ownership compared to the USA (22 percent vs 48 percent of households according to the document linked above). Further to that, in Canada, less than 12 percent of those households own any handguns, being the best guns for sneaking into places to do murders (and the best for killing lots of people quickly at close range once you have done so.) In the US, it is 58 percent.
So Canada has less killings with guns, because they mostly buy guns that are only very good for hunting, mostly only own them in remote rural areas, and hence mostly shoot animals with them. In the USA, they buy handguns, which are good for killing people, keep them in busy cities, and often carry them all the time, and voila, they tend to kill people with them.
So basically, guns don’t kill people, but providing vast numbers of people with the type of gun that is designed to kill people, tends to make it a lot easier for them to kill people.
It also makes it way easier for them to commit suicide – hence the really really high rate of suicide in the US, particularly amongst teenagers. Similar percentages attempt suicide in many other countries, it’s just that we don’t provide about half our kids with a foolproof method of killing themselves. Unless one is to argue that any suicide, even amongst confused teenagers, is natural selection, by supporting widespread and unrestrained gun ownership, you are supporting this state of affairs – essentially saying that your ‘right to bear arms’ is more important than giving thousands of kids the chance to live at least until they are 18.
2)If you arm the teachers, you are giving guns to many thousands of people, all of whom have every day easy access to kids, are regularly stressed out by kids and have mental breakdowns at at least the same rate as any other profession. So, you’re putting guns in the hands of a load of people, all of whom are the most likely people to have some kind of a breakdown around kids, and to be blaming the on kids at the point they have that breakdown. Nice idea.
3)Further to that, and more importantly, assuming you want the teacher’s gun to be close enough at hand for them to shoot an intruder at a moments notice, you are putting a gun which is not safely locked up in a secure lock box (or else they’d never get it out in time), right near a load of kids. That’s not a recipe for an accident when a curious kid finds it (about 200 kids a year die from gun accidents in the USA, and more adults – according to some statistics at least, they have a significantly higher rate of accidental death by gun per 10,000 population than our murder rate).
4)The mental health thing is a bit of a red herring – if mental health services had any way of knowing who was likely to go postal, the people would be locked up already. Other than that, if you seriously think that anyone with mental health issues shouldn’t be allowed a gun (the commonly stated statistic is that this would include approx 25% of people), logically, you’ve also got to say that they shouldn’t live in a house with a gun, which would mean probably a majority of people wouldn’t be allowed guns. It would also be an active deterrent for gun nuts to seek mental health support, as they’d know their guns would get taken away, so could actually make things worse. So the only logical thing to do there is to argue for extreme restrictions on guns.
