Tennessee teacher and gun safety advocates slam move to arm school staff: ‘We don’t go into teaching to kill someone’

Cathy Barnett, a retired Tennessee teacher, has seen the job of an educator in the US change dramatically in the wake of bloody school shooting after bloody school shooting.

Following each tragedy across the country, the gun lobby has pushed the notion that armed teachers in the classroom could have somehow prevented weapons of war being turned on children and teachers.

“We don’t go into the profession to learn to shoot and to kill someone,” she told The Independent.

But that soon could be part of the job, if a proposed bill allowing Tennessee public school teachers to carry firearms on school grounds becomes a law.

The GOP-controlled Tennessee Senate passed the controversial measure, sending the bill to the state House. The chamber has yet to announce when it would take up the bill.

The bill arrived just a year after a former Covenant School student walked into the private school and opened fire, causing a mass shooting that left three students and three school staff members dead.

Ms Barnett, a volunteer for Moms Demand Action, called the state Senate bill “terrible.”

The 74-year-old was an art teacher for 22 years, meaning she taught through the Columbine massacre until she retired just before the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, a tragedy that outranked Columbine to become the deadliest K-12 school shooting in US history.

“Our world has changed so much,” she said, adding that when Columbine happened, it felt very “removed” and distant from her schools in Tennessee. But with Sandy Hook, she thought, “If that can happen in an elementary school,” it can happen anywhere.

It has happened everywhere, data shows. Since 1999, roughly360,000 students have endured school shootings.

As school shootings have been on an alarming