Kindergarten Teacher Arrested After Loaded Gun Found In Classroom

Her classroom was searched after an administrator smelled alcohol on her breath

With news of school shootings being all too frequent and kids being required to participate in “active shooter drills,” sending your kids to school in this country seems to be an increasingly fraught proposition. Of course, most of the time, it’s not the teachers we’re worried about.

A teacher at a Georgia elementary school was arrested after it was discovered that she had carried a gun into her classroom, inside her purse. Also, school administrators noticed that she smelled of alcohol.

The Associated Press has the story of 39-year-old Melanie Bullard, a kindergarten teacher at Shelton Elementary School in Dallas, Georgia. On Thursday afternoon, an employee at the school noticed the smell of alcohol on Bullard’s breath, and when her room was searched for open containers, the loaded gun was found in her purse, which was on the floor under her desk.

In a room full of five-year-olds.

Bullard, who faces charges of possession of a weapon on school property and reckless endangerment, has since been released from jail after posting bond. Paulding County Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Ashley Henson says Bullard did test positive for having alcohol in her system. No word yet on whether she will disciplined by the school.

“Storing” your gun in an unsecured purse, under your desk, in a classroom full of rambunctious, unruly kindergartners is so irresponsible and frightening, we barely even know where to begin. And that’s before the alcohol enters the equation.

Even if you subscribe to the highly-questionable “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun” approach to preventing school shootings, or the even more absurd “let’s arm our teachers with guns” method of protecting our kids, we can probably all agree that Melanie Bullard is not the ideal ambassador for either tactic.

Call us crazy, but we happen to think that increasing the amount of guns on school property is the exact opposite approach to keeping our kids safe, especially with the sheer amount of accidental shootings that take place at the hands of children.

Even if she is trained and qualified to use a firearm, any potential that she might be a “good guy” pretty much went out the window when she showed up to teach kindergarten, armed, with booze on her breath.