For various reasons, part of our culture is having serious contempt for public service workers. Everybody knows that teachers and bus drivers are overpaid. Their jobs do have something in common, in that you really need people who have a particular set of skills that most of us don't have, that set of skills that allows you to not completely lose your shit on a regular basis due to the various provocations of a highly stressful job.
Whenever people complain about greedy, lazy striking teachers or bus drivers because they earn SO MUCH MONEY (usually based on misleading press reports of total compensation rather than salaries), my response is: if it's such a great job, you do it. My local transit authority is always hiring bus drivers.
I wouldn't want either bus drivers or teachers to carry guns because while the ability to not lose your shit is a necessary skill for both jobs, the constant shit-losing provocations still make it pretty likely that people will occasionally. It's one thing to lose your shit when you're unarmed, and quite another to do it when you've got a death machine in your pocket.
