Christine Wald-Hopkins is an adjunct lecturer in English and English education at the University of Arizona.

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Opinion by Christine Wald-Hopkins

I was dismayed and then puzzled to read that a majority of Star respondents actually supported the proposed legislation to allow firearms on campuses ("Online readers favor guns in schools plan," Feb. 4). How could this represent progressive Southern Arizona?

So I decided to ask people who would be directly affected by such legislation — young teachers. I put the guns-in-schools question to my University of Arizona English education class.

My students — juniors and seniors preparing to teach in secondary school — have grown up under the specter of campus gun violence. They were in middle school when Columbine High School was shot up and in high school when the UA nursing instructors were murdered. They were contemporaries of the students mowed down at Virginia Tech.

They're smart. They're informed. They understand the risks. Several have experience with firearms.

And they almost unanimously oppose guns in schools.

My poll sampling was small but invested. This was their message: Guns would contaminate the learning climate. The idea itself is patently unworkable. Participating in life or death situations is not in their job descriptions.

These students asserted that schools are, and should continue to be, "safe havens" for learning. Guns — registered or not — threaten that sanctuary.

The one student who favored the bill argued that arming teachers and administrators would deter a Columbine-like attack, and that female teachers would be more willing to accept risky assignments if they could carry handguns. Those who took issue with her first point said that anyone who had developed a mind-set for murder would hardly be discouraged by the prospect of a teacher's gun.

Addressing both points, a junior literature/writing major wrote that the idea is "paradoxical" that guns equal safety, and that handguns more frequently hurt their owners than dissuade would-be killers.

Practically, they pointed out, concealed-weapon training couldn't prepare public school teachers for the unpredictability of assault situations. The words "violence" and "escalating" recurred in their comments.

One writing major denounced the slippery slope implicit in "violence for the sake of prevention." Most of them attended public schools, so they're familiar with the endemic lower-level threats of bullying, verbal assaults and fistfights. But, as one noted, a single incident of adolescent pique could turn deadly if there were a gun available. Handguns could be as easily pinched from teachers as answer sheets.

"Our job as educators," wrote an English education senior, "is to teach our students and ensure their well-being, something that cannot happen when weapons are on campus. It is not our job to make potentially deadly decisions or provide opportunities for a potentially deadly situation."

We threaten the lives and careers of these teachers of tomorrow if we allow schools to become armed camps.

An alternative message from the "guns poll" needs to come out of Southern Arizona: Legislators Karen Johnson and Russel Pearce owe it to Arizona's children to listen to these young educators and reconsider this wrong-headed bill. If they don't, then reasonable legislators must listen, and bury it.