Yet another op-ed on armed teachers

As the new school year gets underway, we're seeing a lot of discussion on the idea of armed teachers. Here's another op-ed, from Montana, in response to an earlier op-ed opposing the idea of armed teachers:

First, I suggest that he looks back on his former distrust of the Texas concealed carry law revision, and the subsequent lesson that the result was not as bad as he had feared and articulated. The lesson is that Kanelis tends to trust responsible citizens too little and rely on professional law enforcement personnel too much.

Police can almost never interpose themselves between a madman and his victims. The usual response time for a SWAT team to be fully deployed and ready to interdict at a campus shooting will be from 30 minutes to an hour. How many corpses can pile up in that time? And, the standard doctrine for the first-arriving police officers will be to hold and establish a perimeter for the incident, not to intervene. These are the lessons written in innocent blood from Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University.

Op-ed here. Actually, the current doctrine in the wake of Columbine in response to an "active shooter" is for the first responding units to form up as an ad hoc team, enter the school and engage the shooter, rather than form a perimeter and wait for SWAT to arrive. Nevertheless, as we saw at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, even the current doctrine cannot prevent mass loss of life. As the saying goes, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.