Dems Furious As Trump Suggests Arming Teachers With Guns... Then He Mentions Bonuses
During a listening session with lawmakers from Florida on Thursday, President Trump further enumerated his plan to offer concealed carry training for teachers, saying that there ought to be “bonuses” for educators who are prepared to defend their students with firearms.
According to Fox News, the president made the remarks during a session with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Parkland Mayor Christine Hunschofsky, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, among others.
“What I’d recommend doing is the people that do carry, we give them a bonus, we give them a little bit of a bonus,” Trump said, while adding that only employees with “aptitude” ought to be carrying firearms in school.
Trump reiterated that 20 percent of teachers would need to be armed, but said that if they were, “you won’t have these shootings, because these people are cowards.”
The president’s remarks expanded on ones he had made during a listening session with survivors of mass shootings at the White House on Wednesday.
Responding to a question about concealed carry, Trump said it “only works where you have people very adept at using firearms, of which you have many, and it would be teachers and coaches.”
“If the coach had a firearm in his locker when he ran at this guy — that coach was very brave. Saved a lot of lives, I suspect. But if he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run; he would have shot and that would have been the end of it.”
“And this would only be, obviously, for people that are very adept at handling a gun,” he added, according to the Boston Globe.
“And it would be — it’s called concealed carry, where a teacher would have a concealed gun on them. They’d go for special training. And they would be there, and you would no longer have a gun-free zone. A gun-free zone to a maniac — because they’re all cowards — a gun-free zone is, let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us.”
Trump added that it if “you had 20 percent of your teaching force, because that’s pretty much the number,” there would be a much quicker response to a mass shooting at school.
The president noted that “an attack has lasted, on average, about three minutes. It takes five to eight minutes for responders, for the police, to come in. So the attack is over. If you had a teacher … who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly.”
This got characterized as “give teachers guns” in the press, which prompted a Twitter response from the president earlier on Thursday.
I never said “give teachers guns” like was stated on Fake News @CNN & @NBC. What I said was to look at the possibility of giving “concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience – only the best. 20% of teachers, a lot, would now be able to
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018
….immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018
Concealed carry for teachers in schools is something Second Amendment advocates have been calling for for years, in spite of Democrats being furious over it. The fact that he’s giving bonuses is only going to irk them more, if just because it will likely end up demonstrating how guns save lives.
For conservatives, this was likely the best news to come out of the president’s proposals in the wake of the Parkland shooting, which have so far been a mixed bag. Let’s hope the president continues in this vein as opposed to going down the rabbit hole of over-regulation.
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