Teachers are to teach as well as to protect in Florida in case of shooting incidents

There are hundreds of shootings that have taken place at schools across the U.S. in the past 20 years, leaving broken homes and broken childhoods in their wake. The FBI defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more victims, not including the suspect, are killed.

The people who conduct school shootings are generally disaffected mentally unwell individuals searching for a sense of social connection meaning of life. They go online, they look at past attacks and in a different way, they connect with not only past incidents but also past attackers.

Amidst the growing incident of the school shooting in America, Florida is all set to allow teachers to carry firearms to save lives in the event of a shooting. The move has its own share of supporters and opponents.

Supporters of the bill -- which permits teachers to carry firearms on school campuses on a voluntary basis after they have completed 144 hours of training -- say armed teachers could save lives in the event of a school shooting. But its opponents warn of the danger of accidents among teachers who would effectively be tasked with policing as well as education, and who, in the event of a school shooting, could be mistaken for a shooter by law enforcement.

"Arming teachers is a recipe for disaster -- a reckless plan which will complicate active-shooter situations," Representative Val Demings, a Florida Democrat and former Orlando police chief, said of the measure. "The real solution is to keep guns out of the wrong hands," Demings tweeted.

Florida's House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill allowing teachers to carry firearms -- a controversial step whose effectiveness in countering school shootings remains unproven. The aim of the measure, which was previously approved by the state's Senate and now goes to Republican Governor Ron DeSantis's desk, is the prevention of school shootings such as one that left 17 people dead at a high school in Parkland, Florida in February 2018.