I could in many ways see this as a likely outcome, but I wonder what your reasoning is – you, personally.
Are the teachers too close to (i.e. potentially emotionally affected by) the students?
I dunno. When I read your post my initial instinct was to agree easily. But then, after some thought, I find myself wondering why it ought to be any different from my normal "good people should be armed where they will" stance.
Are teachers not already able to bring guns into school and shoot their students – practically, though not legally? Does any law in addition to the one prohibiting murder really affect that to any meaningful degree? Wouldn't this just be another form of inefficacious and fundamentally-missing-the-point gun control?
I just see the situation as different. Once upon a time it was no big deal for guns to be in schools, but there was no pretension of them being there for defense. They were there because students would find it more convenient if they wanted to go hunting or shooting later, or because there was a rifle club on campus, things like that. Then the world was perceived to have become more dangerous (and partly, but to a far lesser degree actually was more dangerous), so guns were removed under the pretense they contributed to danger. Now the world is perceived to have become even more dangerous than that, and guns are being put back into schools as part of a security culture.
It's the relationship and the culture that worries me. Israeli teachers were mentioned, but those guns aren't in those schools with the notion that they might be turned against students, they're there with the notion that they'll be turned against terrorists. This is also in a country which is largely homogeneous and has extreme cultural solidarity and cohesion, not the vast cultural salad bowl of the United States. Teachers in the United States don't just have to teach, they have to keep the peace. They do this with kids who start fights, name call, ignore instructions, go wherever they like, destroy property, do drugs and have sex on school grounds, and just generally do the very best anyone could possibly do to infuriate people who have little recourse but to try and entice cooperation or else call the police. Teachers are almost never genuinely in fear for their lives from students though, which is where a gun is supposed to matter. The risk in my mind is therefore that the gun becomes a compliance tool, or that teachers resort to it under emotional stress. Police do this, and they're trained and know the law.
I just see the separate duties of teaching, maintaining compliance with school policy, and protecting the student body as producing significant enough conflicts of interest to where a single person shouldn't be trusted with all of them simultaneously. To the notion that teachers have a right to self-defense, when it's on the job I'm not sure that they do. They should be protected, just as the students should be protected, but if their ability to effectively do their job is compromised by being armed (which I think it is to an extent), and they're not willing to go unarmed in order to do that job effectively, I think they should find a different line of work. This is also a system that's prone to abuse simply because it deals so nakedly in power and has limited transparency. I'm not comfortable introducing guns into situations like that. Liberty minded people are already stuck with the difficult task of trying to police the police, the
de facto deputizing of another group of civil servants into such a position seems like a bad recipe to me, especially in our present culture where a young teenager is as liable to be treated as a potential threat needing to be controlled as they are a human being needing knowledge and guidance. If a teacher wanted to bring a gun to school now, they would be assumed to be in the wrong and would have the chance to vindicate themselves before a jury of their peers. If they were permitted to carry guns then they would have the benefit of the doubt in murky situations as well as the ability to make these situations however murky they like.
It's worth noting that this debate wouldn't even be necessary were it not for the governmental nature of public schools. As it stands, policy about issues like this on the federal level could have untold national ramifications.