Teacher Guns

Submission 48,643

About

Teacher Guns is a series of image macros featuring jokes about the types of people a variety of firearms are designed for. The series references a debate over whether school teachers should be armed to prevent mass shootings, which began circulating online in February 2018 following the Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Origin

On February 21st, 2018, United States President Donald Trump held a "listening session" with survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. During the event, a parent raised the question of arming teachers with concealed firearms, to which Trump responded that it was "certainly a point we will discuss." The following day, Trump tweeted that he "never said 'give teachers guns'," claimed he only and referred to the news outlets CNN and NBC as "fake news" (shown below).^[2]

On February 25th, 2018, Redditor Rulesy submitted a photograph of a man screwing a silencer on a pistol with the caption "When you start your job as the school librarian" in a post titled "Arm the teachers" (shown below). Within four days, the post gathered upwards of 33,300 points (89% upvoted) and 300 comments on /r/dankmemes.^[6]

Spread

On February 25th, Redditor kremor submitted a post asking "What's the deal with all the post/memes about teachers with guns?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[3] On February 27th, Redditor Under_Score submitted an image macro titled "Arming School Staff," featuring a pistol labeled "Teachers" above a pistol with a silencer labeled "Librarians" to /r/memes^[7] (shown below).

On February 28th, Redditor tbsgrave uploaded an image featuring a picture of a man flexing his bicep labeled "P.E. teacher" to /r/dankmemes,^[5] where it gathered upwards of 1,900 points (94% upvoted) within 24 hours (shown below, left). Meanwhile, the @DankMemes^[1] Twitter feed tweeted a variation of the image featuring a laser gun labeled "science teacher" (shown below, right). Over the next day, the tweet garnered more than 15,600 likes and 6,500 retweets.

#ArmMeWith

On February 22nd, 2018, BuzzFeed^[4] published an article highlighting social media posts by teachers suggesting they be armed with educational tools and resources rather than firearms, along with the hashtag "#ArmMeWith" (shown below).