Teacher Fires Gun in Classroom Injures Student

• Steve
• March 14, 2018
• 0 Comment
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A math teacher and reserve police officer unintentionally discharged a live round in a classroom injuring a student.  The incident occured at Seaside High School in Monterey County, California on Tuesday afternoon.  The teacher was teaching a class on public safety.

Apparently the teacher, Dennis Alexander, aimed the weapon at the ceiling and pulled the trigger firing a live round into the ceiling.  Debris from the discharge hit a student and left him with non-life threatening injuries.  Apparently the teacher was doing this to ensure the gun was not loaded (which anyone that has been properly trained does visually, always assuming the weapon is loaded).  This incident occurs on the heels of the Parkland Valentines day shooting which sparked a debate over teachers being armed in classrooms.

Does this one incident shut down the debate over teachers being armed in classrooms, not necessarily.  This is one incident therefore an issue such as school safety cannot be decided using one event as the data point to set policy.  This incident does help bolster the argument that teachers should not have guns in classrooms considering that this is a reserve police officer that should have received more training than your standard concealed carry weapon course.

The reality with teachers carrying guns is that even if well trained bringing guns into a classroom only increases the chances of an accident like the one above or worse happening in a school.  On the low end a teacher accidentally fires a round grazing him or herself, only damaging a wall or the ceiling, or minimally injures a student.  On the high end of catastrophe, a teacher feels threatened by a student and instead of deescalating the situation, the teacher pulls their weapon and shoots the student in a momentary fit of rage.

Note the proposed scenarios above don’t involve an active shooter (other than the teacher) as the threat.  There are so many variables that exist in these scenarios that again, it is hard to argue for teachers with guns in classrooms.  Take the size of the campus for instance.  The average size of a high school in the United States according to a University of Minnesota survey is 125,000 square feet.  If the average size of a U.S. home is 2000 square feet, you could fit roughly 62 2000 square foot homes in the average U.S. high school.  Knowing that not every teacher in the school is going to be armed, taking into account the randomness of these attacks, what is the likely hood of a teacher with a gun being anywhere near a gunmen when they enter the school and begin shooting?  Also what is the protocol in these situations, should armed teachers leave students to go hunt for the gunmen, or should they stay with their students in their classrooms, gun ready in case the gunmen comes to their class? If the protocol is to go search for the gunmen you’re leaving students exposed, if the protocol is to stay with the students, if the gunmen never comes to your classroom you haven’t stopped anything.

School safety is a complex issue and the answer probably lies somewhere in between what the progressive left wants and what the conservative right is demanding.  In reality we should be looking at our current systems and protocols and closing the loops and making sure those responsible for those current systems are doing their jobs.  There were multiple failures in the system that had people been doing their respective job could have prevented that shooting.  From the FBI to local LEO’s (aka good guys with guns) there mistakes and flat out negligence.  We absolutely have a gun problem in this country but we also have a people problem.  Taking a sensible approach to this and looking at options, scenarios, variables, and common sense we should be able to resolve these issues and provide more safety to our students and family members that work in schools and all our citizens.

A teacher who is also a reserve police officer trained in firearm use accidentally discharged a gun Tuesday at Seaside High School in Monterey County, Calif., during a class devoted to public safety. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

The weapon, which was not described, was pointed at the ceiling, according to a statement from the school, and debris fell from the ceiling.

Seaside Police Chief Abdul Pridgen told the Monterey County Weekly that a male student was “struck in the neck by ‘debris or fragmentation’ from something overhead.” Pridgen said whatever hit the student was not a bullet.

However, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW 8 that it was his understanding that fragments from the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and lodged in the boy’s neck. The father said the teacher told the class before pointing the gun at the ceiling that he was doing so to make sure his gun wasn’t loaded, something that can be determined visually.

“It’s the craziest thing,” Gonzales told the station. “It could have been very bad.”

Gonzales said he learned about the incident when his 17-year-old son came home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck.

“He’s shaken up, but he’s going to be okay. I’m just pretty upset that no one told us anything and we had to call the police ourselves to report it,” the father told the TV station.

The teen was treated at a hospital.

The teacher was identified by police as Dennis Alexander, who teaches math as well as a course in the administration of justice. Alexander is a reserve police officer for Sand City and a Seaside city councilman. He could not immediately be reached for comment but he has reportedly apologized for the incident.

The Monterey County Weekly, quoting Sand City Police Chief Brian Ferrante, reported that Alexander had his last gun safety training less than a year ago. “I have concerns about why he was displaying a loaded firearm in a classroom,” Ferrante told KSBW. “We will be looking into that.”

Exactly why the teacher was displaying the weapon at all was not entirely clear. Police said he was “providing instruction related to public safety.”

Daniel “PK” Diffenbaugh, superintendent of the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, told the Weekly that the incident occurred during the administration of justice class, a career track course offered by the school. “Clearly, we will revisit this incident to ensure that something like this would never happen again.”

Diffenbaugh noted that state law and school policy forbids carrying firearms on campus without authorization. Alexander, he said, was not authorized.

“I think a lot of questions are on parents’ minds are, why a teacher would be pointing a loaded firearm at the ceiling in front of students,” Diffenbaugh told KSBW. “Clearly, in this incident, protocols were not followed.”

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