Delaware School Employee Shoots Self in the Leg

It was early Thursday morning at Aspira High School in Newark, Delaware, when a man’s gun went off inside a hallway filled with students and staff. He wasn’t an intruder. He wasn’t a student. He was a school employee. A bus driver. The very person kids are supposed to trust. The gun was hidden in his waistband, and he shot himself in the leg before first period even started.

That’s it. That’s the whole argument against arming teachers.

Because this wasn’t a shootout. This wasn’t self-defense. This was a grown adult deciding to carry a gun into a school building, where it had no business being, and now a whole student body is left with that memory burned into their minds. Not just the sound of a shot fired in a hallway, but the sight of chaos, lockdown orders, police blocking entrances, emergency helicopters, buses rerouted, parents panicking, kids being hauled off to churches to be picked up like evacuees. All because someone who was never supposed to have a gun on campus decided to bring one anyway.

This is what happens when guns are seen as accessories to education, when the fantasy of the ‘good guy with a gun’ becomes policy. It turns classrooms into combat zones and hallways into accident scenes. Now, some of the very same people who want to turn every teacher into a walking armory are pretending this was just an isolated mistake. But it wasn’t. It’s a warning.

The reality is that carrying a gun doesn’t make someone a hero. It doesn’t make them safer. It doesn’t magically grant them training, discipline, or calm decision-making in moments of panic. What it does, especially in schools, is increase the chances that someone gets shot who was never supposed to be anywhere near a bullet.

No student should ever have to hear a gun go off in their school unless it’s on a news broadcast they’re watching in civics class. Instead, students heard one in person. They saw the aftermath with their own eyes. No amount of official reassurances can make that go away.

If the answer to school violence is more guns in schools, explain this. Explain the police tape outside a Delaware high school. Explain the leg wound and the lockdown. Explain the bus ride to a church six miles away. Explain the parents pacing in a parking lot wondering if their kid is about to be the next headline.

Or maybe just admit what should have been obvious all along. Guns and classrooms do not mix. Not in the hands of strangers, not in the hands of students, and definitely not in the hands of school staff.

If someone trusted to help guide students through their day can shoot himself in the middle of a hallway, what do you think happens when the state hands out guns to teachers under the illusion of protection?

You get chaos. You get trauma. You get another headline.

Yet, nothing ever changes.

(Sources)