Public Opinion on Support for Arming Teachers with Guns in the United States

Abstract

Proposals to arm teachers with guns have emerged in reaction to high-profile school shootings in the United States. Though controversial, these proposals have gained the support of various policymakers and special-interest groups. Public opinion, however, is largely divided on the issue and split on political lines. This study seeks to unpack the reasons why Americans may support arming teachers, drawing from multiple theoretical perspectives. Findings indicate support for the culture conflict perspective, with conservative respondents being more likely to support arming teachers and Black respondents and those who are more educated and have higher incomes less likely to support arming teachers. While instrumental concerns such as economic pessimism and anger at the country’s direction are associated with less support, those with children are more likely to support arming teachers. Findings on the role of feelings toward law enforcement on arming teachers are mixed. Implications for policy and research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Public opinion
• school violence
• arming teachers
• gun attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The inclusion of multiple attitudes towards guns and gun control brings up questions of multicollinearity. Analysis of variance inflation factors (VIFs) for the full model reveals no VIF over 2.1.

2 While is not an ideal measure of attitudes toward police as it conflates a number of attitudes that may be relevant, there is merit to examining it. As Carlson (2012) observes, a key motivation for arming oneself is the perception that that police are ineffective. This perception can exist even when a person feels favorably toward law enforcement; in fact, someone may favor law enforcement to the degree that they see themselves as helping the police in stopping crime by carrying a gun. While the current measure of feelings toward police cannot parse out these specific attitudes and perceptions, it is included as a conservative measure of general disposition toward the police that may be indicative of greater trends.

3 It is possible that fear and anger toward crime or school shootings specifically would impact support for arming teachers. Unfortunately, the ANES does not ask about fear or anger toward school shootings or of crime in general. I did explore the influence of a potential proxy measure of concern for crime—the importance of maintaining order. A random selection of half of the ANES sample was asked which of four issues is most important, with one of the responses being “Maintaining order in the nation.” Respondents were also asked what they believe to be the next most important and given the same four issues. From these questions I created two dummy variables—a variable with 1 coded as respondents who believe that maintaining order is the most important problem, and a variable with 1 coded as respondents who believe that maintaining order is the most or second-most important problem. I ran all models with each of these variables and found that neither was significantly related to support for arming teachers. This is not surprising, as the relationship between fear of crime and support for gun control is unclear (see Kleck, 1997; Filindra & Kaplan, 2016). I did not include either of these variables in the full analysis, as it would have substantially decreased the sample size.

4 In separate analyses, I explored a potential mediating effect of the law enforcement variables. In these analysis, neither feelings toward police nor the FBI had a significant mediating effect on conservative ideology, Black, or economic pessimism.

5 Unfortunately, the 2019 ANES Pilot Study does not contain a question about respondents’ support for arming teachers with guns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew J. Baranauskas

Andrew J. Baranauskas is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at SUNY Brockport. His research interests include public opinion on crime and justice, crime and media, and communities and crime. His work has been published in Criminology and Criminal Justice Review.