"I think a lot of people are going to be opposed to it, I think a lot of people are going to like it."
Donald Trump has proposed arming school teachers with guns in an effort to prevent school shootings in the United States in the wake of the most recent incident in Florida last week.
On Wednesday, the US President held a listening session with survivors of the massacre at Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed after a gunman opened fire on Valentine’s Day.
During the listening session, Trump suggested that arming teachers with guns, in the same way that some airline pilots are permitted to carry guns in the cockpit, could be a potential solution to help prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.
“It only works when you have people very adept at using firearms, of which you have many,” Trump said of the proposal.
“It would be teachers and coaches.”
Trump made reference to Aaron Feis, a football coach who was shot and killed while using his body to shield two students and suggested that if he had been carrying a gun, that he would have been able to stop the shooting.
“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,” Trump added.
“But if he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run, he would have shot him, and that would have been the end of it. This would only obviously be for people who are very adept at handling a gun. 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. 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’.”
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/966438377326284802
“An attack has lasted, on average, about three minutes,” Trump continued.
“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.”
“The good thing about a suggestion like that, and we’re going to be looking at it very strongly and I think a lot of people are going to be opposed to it, I think a lot of people are going to like it, but the good thing is you’ll have a lot of people with that, you can’t have 100 security guards in school like Stoneman Douglas, that’s a big school.”
Amongst those to speak at the listening session was Stoneman Douglas student Samuel Zeif, 18, who said that he couldn’t understand why, under gun laws in the US, he can still go into a store and buy "a weapon of war".
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/966432939352485888
At one point during the session, Trump asked for a show of hands to determine the response to the proposal, with a number of those present raising their hands to indicate support, while others opposed it.
“We can understand both sides and certainly it’s controversial,” he said.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/966487844662456320?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
