The National Rifle Association revealed a plan last week to arm teachers and volunteers to guard U.S. schools.

The plan is naive, dangerous and expensive, and here’s why:

First, we have all seen too many movies and television police shows where a handsome cop rips off a round or two and cleanly nails someone shooting at him.

Bruce Willis can do it hundreds of times in the same movie. How hard can it be?

But police officers who have been in shooting situations, and years of statistics, tell another story.

An interesting story in January’s “Time” magazine interviewed cops who have faced gunfire and those who train police officers. The article is titled “Your Brain in a Shootout: Guns, Fear and Flawed Instincts.”

“Winning a gunfight without shooting innocent people typically requires realistic, expensive training and a special kind of person,” the article said.

Even the trained officers of the New York City police department only hit their targets 18 percent of the time. Recently, when they fired at an armed man outside the Empire State Building they hit nine bystanders before felling the man.

In 2009, a man tried robbing an off-duty police officer at an ATM. Both men fired repeatedly at each other from only feet apart, and neither man was hit. The officer fired six times before the robber just ran away.

“Under sudden attack, the brain does not work the way we think it will,” said Ryan Millbern who, as a police officer, has responded to two active-shooter incidents in his career.

Millbern said he has seen grown men “freeze under threat, like statues.” They forget or struggle to do simple things, like release the safety on their guns.

“I’ve heard arguments that an armed teacher could and would respond to an active shooter in the same way a cop would. I think this is very unrealistic.”

Second, there would be the tremendous expense of maintaining trained teachers, police officers and volunteers in schools with only a negligible chance of a shooting incident.

Most police officers go an entire career without firing their weapon, and they are facing bad people every day.

Finally, introducing guns into thousands of American schools would risk accidental discharges, like those that have already occurred in schools with police resource officers.

Since we are throwing around ideas, how about this one: Stop the person before they can get near children by installing intruderproof doors in hallways and classrooms.

Then place panic buttons in strategic places, like the school’s front office.

In an incident like Newtown, a secretary or principal in the office could have instantly locked down the entire school, which would have made it difficult or impossible for Adam Lanza to enter any of the classrooms.

It would also have alleviated the need for them to confront the heavily armed killer.

Only police would know how to release the door locks, plus teachers would be able to unlock individual rooms from inside their classrooms when they felt the danger had passed.

That would be a one-time expense, but it would likely be less costly than buying tens of thousands of weapons and paying teachers for 40 to 60 hours of training and regular refresher courses.

It would also eliminate the need to introduce guns, which would give children a false sense of the actual danger they face each day in school.

The trouble with the NRA is that their solution to gun problems is always more guns.

— The Sun Journal of Lewiston