A photograph purportedly showing an armed teacher at a school in Israel tends to get passed around the Internet every time there is a school shooting in the United States.
Second amendment advocates have been using this image since at least 2012 (when twenty children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut) to argue that arming teachers would prevent future fatalities.
And, unfortunately, it was posted again in February 2018, in the wake of a deadly school shooting in Florida:
This image is real in the sense that it has not been digitally altered (other than the text) and it appears that it was truly taken in Israel. However, this image was not taken at a school, and Israel's school security practices make it unlikely that the armed woman in the photograph is a teacher.
The earliest version of this image that we could find came from a 23 June 2011 post on Teejaw.com about a mass shooting at a summer camp in Norway that left nearly 80 people dead. The author of that post argued that the death toll would have been lower if one of the adults had been armed and used the viral photograph (which they claimed was taken in the Old City of Acre, Israel in 2002) to show how other countries protect their children:
If some of the adults on the island had been armed would the death toll have been lower? I think so. The shooter in Tucson who recently killed 5 and wounded a U.S. Congresswoman was stopped by a CCW holder (without using his firearm, but he was armed).
It may be that the United States and Israel are the only civilized countries where a majority of people understand the simple concept that a deranged man with a gun can only be stopped by other people with guns (unless a brave group takes him down by charging him at great risk to themselves, which also happened in Tucson). This photo I took in the City of Acre, Israel in 2002 of a couple of school teachers on a class outing with their students reveals that understanding.
