NRA OFFERS FREE GUN LESSONS TO U.S. SCHOOLS.
NRA offers free firearms training
• Donald Trump defended the National Rifle Association, America’s biggest gun lobby, Thursday saying it was led by “great people” who would “do the right thing” as he intensified his support for arming schoolteachers.
The U.S. president said “attacks would end” if around a fifth of America’s teachers were armed with concealed weapons and trained how to use them.
Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association (NRA), last night offered free firearms training to schools to stop the “evil that walks among us.”
Trump’s enthusiasm for arming teachers was a response to America’s worst high school shooting. A total of 17 people died when Nikolas Cruz, 19, opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last week.
Trump wrote on Twitter: “What many people don’t understand is that the folks who work so hard at the NRA are great people and great American patriots. If a potential ‘sicko shooter’ knows that a school has a large number of very weapons-talented teachers and others who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will never attack that school. Cowards won’t go there.”
Later, during his second White House meeting in two days to discuss how to respond to the shooting, Trump said he wants “certain highly adept people, people who understand weaponry, guns” to have a permit to carry concealed firearms in schools.
Teachers who were qualified to handle a weapon — Trump estimated between 10 per cent and 40 per cent — would receive “a little bit of a bonus,” he said, adding, that he would devote federal money to training them.
He also vowed to push for tighter background checks for those buying weapons, along with investment in mental health services, and potentially raising the age people can buy a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21.
Trump said: “Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue — I hope!”
At a conference of conservative activists Thursday near Washington, VicePresident Mike Pence said the administration would make school safety “our top national priority.”
Calling school shootings “evil in our time,” Pence exhorted those in positions of authority “to find a way to come together with American solutions.”
It was a markedly different tone than that deployed on stage minutes earlier by LaPierre, who delivered an unbowed defence of gun ownership and lashed out at Democrats — saying they are using the tragedy for “political gain.”
“We must immediately harden our schools,” he said. “Every day, young children are being dropped off at schools that are virtually wide open, soft targets for anyone bent on mass murder.
“The elites don’t care about America’s school system and schoolchildren. Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”
He questioned why professional basketball games and parts of Hollywood had armed guards but schools did not, and lashed out at the FBI for failing to act on a tip about the gunman.
However, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida and ardent NRA supporter, publicly criticized the proposal to arm teachers. He said: “The notion that my kids are going to school with teachers that are armed with a weapon is not something that ... I’m comfortable with.”
Alfonso Calderon, 16, a survivor of the Florida shooting, said: “Teachers are meant to be educators. They are not meant to know how to carry AR-15s. They are not meant to know how to put on Kevlar vests.”
Trump floated the idea on Wednesday during an emotionally charged White House “listening session” with survivors of mass shootings in Florida, Columbine and Sandy Hook.
Trump said he was not in favour of one measure that schools around the nation have increasingly taken to defend themselves and their students against school shooters: holding drills to practice what to do.
“Active shooter drills is a very negative thing,” Trump said after Pam Stewart, the Florida Department of Education commissioner, mentioned such preparations. “I don’t like it. I’d much rather have a hardened school.”
Meanwhile, Kansas legislative leaders have cancelled a debate on a gun-safety education bill giving preference to a NRA program in elementary schools.
Top Kansas House Republicans said they called off Thursday’s debate because they want to work on a comprehensive plan for preventing gun violence at schools.
But they were facing backlash from Democrats and GOP moderates. Republican Rep. Stephanie Clayton said it was too soon after the Florida shooting.
The bill would allow schools to offer gun-safety courses starting in kindergarten but mandate that the curriculum be based on the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe program through the fifth grade.
Supporters said the bill would encourage schools to teach gun safety and the NRA has a good program.