2/28/2018
So much for President Trump’s idea of arming teachers. On Wednesday, a teacher armed with a handgun went off the rails and fired shots inside the high school where he was teaching.
Jesse Randall Davidson barricaded himself in an empty classroom as confused students tried to enter the room, police said. Davidson refused to let anybody enter, and when the principal put a key in the door in an attempt to enter, Davidson fired a shot from a handgun through an exterior window of the classroom. The school went into lockdown, and police quickly arrived and evacuated the immediate area around the classroom.
Davidson surrendered about 45 minutes after police arrived. When Davidson shot through the exterior window of the room, it didn’t appear he was aiming at any person, police spokesman Bruce Frazier said. Police later stated that Davidson would face charges of aggravated assault, carrying a weapon on school grounds, terroristic threats, reckless conduct, possession of gun during commission of a crime, and disrupting a public school. Curiously, Principal Steve Bartoo said Davidson was an “excellent teacher” who was “well thought of in our building.”
President Trump recently proposed arming teachers with guns in classrooms. However, the President may have falsely assumed that all teachers with guns were perfectly sane. Davidson proved that assumption wrong.
In 2016, Davidson told Dalton police that he had an online affair with a woman who refused to end contact with him, and two of his friends offered to “take care of her,” according to a 2016 officer incident report. Davidson said he agreed. Later when he asked if they scared her, the friends said it was worse than that, which he understood to mean that they killed her, the incident report said. The claims went unfounded. “It appears the subject may be delusional or have something else that had occurred that is causing to have these thoughts,” the report stated.
Davidson, who allegedly was on several medications for depression at the time, had just gotten out of the hospital when he spoke to police on March 21, 2016.
The teacher also had an incident near campus grounds in 2017. Claiming he didn’t feel well, Davidson called his son and mother to pick him up from the school building. School staff began looking for him throughout the school but found him almost a mile away sitting on a curb.
Davidson’s case exemplifies exactly why Trump’s idea of teachers carrying guns is flawed. Of the approximately 600,000 teachers Trump wants to arm, many of those are mentally unfit to carry a weapon. People who are mentally unstable may go from being “an excellent teacher” as Davidson’s principal described him, to an unhinged lunatic in mere minutes. What may result could be an unstable teacher who simply walks past all security with a fully loaded weapon to greet 30-40 students. Let’s hope sanity prevails and the thought of purposefully bringing more guns into a school goes out the window, just like Davidson’s bullet.
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