In the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has thrice backed a plan to arm teachers in U.S. schools despite the lack of evidence showing this would end school shootings.
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“Highly trained, gun-adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly”, he said, arguing that the policy would be a “great deterrent”.
At the White House, Colorado’s Republican Minority Leader, state Rep. Patrick Neville, suggested that schools needed to be hardened up as well.
“We need schools to be gun-free zones. I believe teachers should teach”, said Broward Sheriff Scott Israel.
Steve Villarreal, the president of the St. Vrain Valley School District teacher union, said he hasn’t heard any teachers approach him because they want to be able to carry firearms in the classroom. They get paid hardly anything, they get given classes of far too many kids who have been conditioned by their previous teachers to despise the prospect of learning anything. “Well, people may come in and shoot you”. “And it’s gonna be fast”, he said.
School Board President Bob Smith said while it may seem simple to add more armed staff to a school campus, the “reality is much more complicated”. “Frankly, they’d feel more comfortable having a gun anyway”, Trump said.
Training teachers to wield weapons isn’t a sound idea, she said.
In September 2014 at Idaho State University, a teacher accidentally shot himself in the foot when his concealed handgun discharged. He backed that up by saying it was “much less expensive than the guards” and would more effective and “look better”. On an ongoing basis, many schools also conduct active shooter drills, which include lock downs and sheltering in place.
“And when I had those hundreds of terrified children that were running at me, my question to that is, am I supposed to get extra training now to serve and protect on top of educating these children on how to be these eloquent speakers that are coming up and presenting issues to you? I have taken the gun from a guy that had just killed three kids, and also the perspective of a person whose been around guns all their life”, Bond said.
Acknowledging that the idea was controversial, Trump said that his administration would give it serious study. And the other thing I would say is that there are a number of school districts in MA, including the one where my kids went to school, where you have resource officers who are police officers in many of your schools at various times during the day, sometimes the whole day.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar echoed the president’s urgency on addressing the mental illness component to preventing shootings, stressing the importance of screening and treatment around mental illness, as well as community engagement and research on the next generation of therapies.
“It’s very different shooting at a target versus shooting at a real human being”, said Johnson. “These are human beings, these are animals”.
Trump sounded confident of his ability to get the NRA onside. “The sanctuary city situation”, he says. “I’m thinking about doing it”.
Trump’s disinterest in gun control stands in contrast to the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who made clear during a CNN town hall event on Wednesday that they support an AR-15 ban.
Ashley Kurth, a culinary arts teacher at the school who also sheltered dozens of students during the shooting, also had her doubts. In Wisconsin, the attorney general said he’s open to the idea. For example, if the coaches who I guarantee have experience with weapons, with gun, you need a hard. This didn’t just happen in a vacuum. “He had a whole way of running for office that particularly excluded these kinds of listening sessions”, Mercieca said.
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“I am for stricter gun laws and a cap on the sale of ammunition”, she added.
