Parenting

Parkland Teacher Offers To Arm Himself, Then Leaves Loaded Gun In Public Bathroom

by Christina Marfice
Image via tomap49 / Getty

A Parkland teach offering to carry his gun at school left it loaded in a public bathroom, because of course he did

Since the Parkland shooting, which left 17 dead and forced high school survivors to stand up and start instigating the conversations about gun control that adults have refused to have for years, there’s been a push in many states across the U.S. to allow teachers to carry guns.

The thinking there is that somehow an armed teacher will win a gunfight with a shooter intent on massacring students and teachers alike, even though most schools, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas High where the Parkland shooting took place, already have armed resource officers who clearly don’t stop shootings from happening. In fact, what we’ve seen so far is exactly zero instances of armed teachers stopping shootings, and many, many instances of accidental gun firings in classrooms.

Nevertheless, Parkland chemistry teacher Sean Simpson volunteered to arm himself in the classroom following the shooting at MSD — and he’s now been arrested after forgetting his loaded gun in a public restroom.

Simpson was at Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier on Sunday, about 13 miles away from MSD High, where he teaches during the week. According to the Washington Post, he told police he removed his loaded Glock 43 9mm pistol and placed it on the handrail of a bathroom stall while he did his business. He then left the stall to wash his hands, leaving his gun sitting on the handrail. After washing his hands, did he go back for his loaded, deadly weapon? Nope. He straight up forgot it in the stall and left the bathroom to carry on with his day.

Simpson claims he remembered his gun less than five minutes later, but as he was walking back to get it, he heard a gunshot. Yep, you guessed it. Someone found the loaded gun and fired it. Simpson said he got back to the stall and “snatched” his gun from the homeless man who was holding it. According to police, he had found the gun and fired it to see if it was loaded. The bullet hit a wall, and a shell casing was found on the bathroom floor.

Police arrested Simpson for unsafe storage of a firearm, a misdemeanor in Florida. Frankly, he got lucky.

“There was a reasonable likelihood that the firearm could have ended up in the hands of a child or the discharge of the firearm could have wounded another person or child,” police wrote in Simpson’s arrest affidavit.

Or accidentally killed them.

And this guy wants to carry his gun on school grounds at his job at MSD. Can you imagine if he left that gun in a school restroom? Can you imagine the trauma those poor kids would go through if this had happened on school grounds, and they heard a gunshot coming from outside their classrooms? Haven’t they been through enough without us actually considering this kind of absolutely asinine “solution”?

We already know what will work to end gun violence, in our schools and elsewhere, because we’ve seen what works all over the world. Arming teachers will make schools more dangerous, not more safe. How many more idiots like Simpson have to prove it before we move on from this debate and talk about what will actually work?