A school in Texas is allowing teachers to bring loaded guns into the classroom, to protect students if there is a school shooting.
The school, in the tiny Texas farming town of Harrold, is half an hour away from the sheriff’s office.
David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District thinks teachers and students will be left unprotected for too long if an incident occurs.
"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started, "Thweatt said in a story published on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's web site.
"Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog."
This will be the first school in the US to allow teachers to bear firearms.
The armed teachers will have to have a state gun licence, and will only be able to use specific bullets which won’t ricochet off walls and desks.
But not all the staff are happy with the move, one teacher described it as a “disaster waiting to happen.”
With more than a dozen school shootings occurring in the US in the past decade, a number of security measures have been introduced across the country.
Ken Trump, a specialist in advising school boards on security, recommended it would be more sensible to hire security guards than to give guns to "minimally supervised, minimally trained" teachers.