> I assume you're referring to the 10 RPG's that were marked for destruction, but instead sold to criminals by the Army officer who was responsible for them, 17 years ago ?

Sounds about right. And yeah, that might sound like a one-off issue from a long time ago, but if even Australia ain't immune to improper disposal, the US' prospects don't seem like they'd be much better.

More to the point: the ACIC estimates Australia to still have hundreds of thousands of guns in illicit circulation (i.e. not corresponding to authorized civilian ownership): https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/13159

> The smart solution would be to solve discrimination.

And as I said before, that doesn't happen overnight.

> Perhaps start with a simple policy of not hiring racists as cops, and firing those who are already cops?

And neither does that, especially when the very people hiring those cops are themselves racists/homophobes/fascists or otherwise sympathetic with them, or (far enough up the chain) are outright elected by them.

Besides, that still doesn't address the issues with response time; even if all cops are perfectly just and rational and moral and do their jobs perfectly, until we invent teleportation and/or build a pool for some telepathic teenagers to swim around in and predict crimes before they happen, they are very unlikely to actually stop crime before it's already happened, at which point it's too late and the best you can do is hope the perpetrator gets caught before committing further crime.

> If your argument for why the average man-on-the-street needs a gun is "well someone else might have a gun"

No, there's no "might" in that argument. Criminals already have guns. They will continue to have guns even if we were to ban civilian gun ownership entirely (thankfully nobody of political significance is suggesting going that far, at least not yet). Some of those criminals, in fact, happen to wear badges and uniforms, and are exempt from such restrictions (and will continue to be for as long as they wear those badges and uniforms).

> Elected officials in your country have suggested

Elected officials in my country have suggested plenty of ridiculous things, like mandating that pi = 3 or banning end-to-end encryption.

That said...

> I mean seriously this idea is fucking insane.

Do you have a specific objective reason for that belief?

If a teacher wants to carry a firearm in the defense of oneself and one's students, and is voluntarily trained and certified to do so safely and responsibly, I don't fundamentally see a problem with that. There's not really an objective reason to object to it, with the possible sole exception of "what if a student snatches the gun off the teacher's holster" (which is applicable to law enforcement and security personnel, too, if not more so, and yet rarely happens, especially with modern holsters being designed specifically to prevent that).

And frankly, I'm more inclined to trust the average teacher to wield a firearm than I do the average police officer. The latter is statistically more likely to just end up killing the students one's ostensibly there to "protect and serve". The former is statistically more likely to actually care about the students' well being.

You're right that outright mandating it as a job duty is insane, though; nobody (or at least no civilian) should be forced to carry a firearm, especially when one is not comfortable or experienced/practiced with using one, for the same reason nobody should be forced to vote in an election or speak a politically-dissenting opinion or otherwise exercise one's Constitutional rights.

> then problem is clearly not the guns but the culture

Or, like I originally said (and to which you seemingly haven't really responded), the economic and mental health factors that are the much more visible and obvious and Occam's-razor-compatible difference between the United States and the rest of the "West". Guns don't magically induce criminal intent, nor do they magically induce mental health problems. People with criminal intent or mental health problems still have those problems regardless of whether or not they have legal access to guns. If we fix those problems, then they wouldn't feel as strong of a desire to hurt people in the first place, let alone with guns.

Those problems don't fix themselves overnight, either, but even partially fixing them makes things a lot better for a lot more people than even perfectly-executed gun control does.