In the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting massacre, there is little disagreement that laws need to be changed to make it more hard for someone with mental health issues to buy a firearm. It says, “I hear you”.
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Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that his proposal to allow teachers and other school staff to carry weapons was “controversial”, but appears to be pressing forward regardless.
USA president Donald Trump reiterated his suggestion that arming teachers is a solution to gun violence in American schools, as outrage over last week’s mass shooting in Florida continued across the country.
The president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called arming teachers a frightful idea and said an educator’s handgun would be no match for the assault-style weapons often wielded by attackers.
“We have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it”, Trump said. People like to blame them, and they do have power and all of that, but they want to do things.
Trump also tweeted that if “a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers”, a shooter wouldn’t attempt an attack.
Trump had proposed Wednesday during a White House listening session with shooting survivors that arming teachers could curb gun violence at schools. “You walk into school and see a teacher with a gun”, said Michael Lowery, a junior at Palm Springs High School.
“A gun-free zone, to a maniac – because they are all cowards – a gun-free zone is ‘Let’s go in and let’s attack”, Trump said at the meeting. “If they know they have to come strapped and armed every day to school”, said Herb Claggett, the president of Palm Springs Teachers Association.
“We can understand both sides”.
“And the beauty is it’s concealed”, Trump said. “The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous”.
The president predicted that in forthcoming elections this year, Democrats would “take away” massive tax cuts, referencing to his signature tax law signed in December, “and they will take away your Second Amendment (the right to bear arms)”.
But when 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton argued that Trump would bring guns into classrooms, he denied that he ever advocated for that.
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Boulder Valley School District interim Superintendent Cindy Stevenson said she looked extensively at the issue of arming teachers in her 12 years as superintendent in the Jefferson County School District, which includes Columbine High School where students shot and killed 12 kids and a teacher in 1999. “Wrong!” he tweeted in May 2016.
