Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what happened in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day. Before I knew where it happened, I was in a panic. My mother, aunt, and cousins work in the school system in Florida. My niece and little cousins are in elementary school and my other “little” cousin is about to graduate high school. My heart was in my stomach. But when I found out that it was a school a few hours away, I calmed down a bit, but my heart still hurt. I haven’t become desensitized yet when it comes to mass shootings. But out of the pain and grief, the students of Parkland have risen and taken control of their lives and their future. Before I try to make my points, I will say that if you think the students fighting for gun control are crisis actors, if you think that gun control means that your guns will be taken away, and if you are making excuses for the domestic terrorist Nikolas Cruz, kindly click out of this article.

Before I started writing professionally, I was a high school teacher. Teaching wasn’t my passion, but I still gave it my all, despite being constantly annoyed day in and day out. When it came down to it, I loved my kids, and we did have talks about the possibility of a shooting happening. If that day ever came, we had a plan. But, I am here to tell you that teachers do not need guns; it’s an erroneous assumption that that is what teachers need. Most of the people that I see on social media saying that we should arm teachers have never stepped foot in a classroom and are just agreeing with everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth. People that think that because teachers have summers off and breaks throughout the year, that somehow means that being a teacher is easy. They don’t take into consideration that teachers have make lesson plans and backup lesson plans, that they have to deal with hundreds of students a day, students’ parents, and countless development meetings. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t teachers out there that want guns, but they're in a minority. Putting guns in the hands of educators is not going to fix the gun problem that our country has.

What teachers need are proper resources. If the government can spend millions of dollars training teachers how to use guns, they can spend millions of dollars on getting better textbooks and resources that teachers need to take the education of their students to the next level. Teachers need and deserve higher salaries because even when I was teaching, I still had to work a second job.

Teachers need districts and superintendents that believe in them because nothing is more annoying than having a walkthrough with a group of people that have no idea what it takes to teach your subject. Teachers need a curriculum that isn’t filled to the brim with standardized testing, because not only does it frustrate the teachers, it stresses out and frustrates the students as well.

There are countless ways that our government can help our teachers in and out of the classroom. There are ways to keep the children of this nation safe as they go to school every day and that is with gun control. To the students of Parkland and around the country, fight every single day. You are the future of this country and don’t you dare let anyone tell you differently.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,- That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to it institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”