PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — When Pakistani Taliban militants stormed a Peshawar school and massacred 150 children and teachers, nobody could fight back. Shabnam Tabinda and some of her fellow teachers want to change that – and are practicing how to shoot terrorists.
Government authorities in Pakistan’s northwest frontier have given permission for teachers to carry concealed firearms in response to the Dec. 16 attack in Peshawar that became one of the deadliest terrorist strikes in Pakistani history. Many educators reject the idea of arming teachers as reckless and counterproductive, reflecting the kind of arguments in U.S. school systems overshadowed by their own occasional mass shootings.
But for teachers like 37-year-old Tabinda, going to work unarmed no longer feels like an option. She and 10 other female teachers at the Frontier College for Women are taking pride in their newfound marksmanship with handguns, and plan to carry them to help protect their students aged 16 to 21.
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Fresh from her own two-day course learning to load, unload and fire Glock 9mm handguns, Tabinda said her family had already suffered enough from Taliban terrorism, including her husband’s wounding in a suicide bomb strike a few years ago. He still is carrying shrapnel in his stomach from that attack.
When she fired her first shot at a paper target, Tabinda said her police instructor was impressed that she hit the bull’s-eye, depicting the chest of a human target. Tabinda said she was visualizing the Taliban killers behind December’s school slaughter as she fired.
“I hit them right in their hearts,” she said.
