Want to end gun violence, Trump? Ban guns
For those who think President Trump can’t sink lower, here’s the latest lowest. He was given a crib sheet of things he should say to student survivors of mass killings and the parents of the dead. When I study handwriting comparisons, it may well have been written by his daughter Ivanka. She knows her father.
He was told to listen, shut up and say these things. 1. “What would you like me to know most about your experience?” 2. “What can we do to help you feel safe?” 3. His meaty fingers blocked this one out. 4. “Resources? Ideas?” 5. “I hear you.” I am now imagining Trump midway through that meeting of broken hearts and saying, “His meaty fingers blocked this one out.”
The students told him gently — they were not an angry group because that terrific type of student wasn’t invited — about lives lost to guns and why gun control was necessary. But when it came to solutions, the teenage drive for gun control was muted. The 29-year-old brother of a Parkland victim and one Parkland father suggested arming teachers.
So what does Trump get from the meeting? The suggestion that sounded easiest, cheapest and popular with the NRA: more guns.
After this was reported, Trump tweeted that he never said that, though he did.
He wanted “highly trained, gun adept teachers” ready to shoot in- vading “savage sickos” which would be cheaper than hiring school officers so, bingo. “Cowards won’t go there. Problem solved.” I’ve extracted that from a long frightening stream of consciousness speech at the White House. He wants “hardened schools.”
But the staff cop, since dismissed, who guarded Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was highly trained and gun adept. During the shooting, he froze. He could not bring himself to run inside to save children, perhaps to his own death.
If he couldn’t do it, why would teachers be expected to?
Trump also wants background checks focusing on mental health, a ban on bump stocks and a higher age, 21, for rifle purchases. But the Orlando killer was 29, and the killer of 69 Norwegian students was 32.
The Parkland killer had 10 guns. Could “adept” armed teachers have faced him down? How would their resumés read? “University degree, Teachers’ college, MS Word, Excel, LVI Handgun, Active Killer-Shooter LE/Civ, Cert. Field Emergency Medicine.” If you’re a bad teacher but a great sniper, this could be a golden time for unfortunates like you.
And what if Trump’s “savage sicko” was a teacher with a gun? Oh, there’s always one. Remember Mr. Radge in auto shop?
Meanwhile, I read about an Idaho chemistry professor who shot himself in the foot with a concealed handgun in class. If it interests you, most U.S. accidental gunshots affect the foot and leg, followed by arm and hand.
The solution to bad teachers like Mr. Radge — and this is a solution I suspect Trump would like — would be to arm high school students. Even with rigorous background checks, no one’s going to make it through Grade 11 alive. Students are excitable. They have cliques. Imag- ine teenage boys in the gym showers armed with AR-15s.
I have always been sardonic about gun licences. You fill the forms out yourself. The police say they’ll check, but will they? In Canada, the famously inefficient RCMP ask you this: During the past five (5) years, have you threatened or attempted suicide, or have you suffered from or been diagnosed or treated by a medical practitioner for: depression; alcohol, drug or substance abuse; behavioural problems; or emotional problems?
Say you’re Nikolas Cruz. You just write NO. You are a mentally unfit person who doesn’t think they’re mentally unfit, which of course is sometimes a symptom of mental unfitness. Frankly, you’d be the last to know. So NO.
I struggle with ticket machines in parking garages. I often teach in classrooms. Do not give me a gun. My talent does not lie in hitting meat targets.
A handgun bullet leaves a laceration, what a radiologist would see as a “linear, thin, gray bullet track” through the liver, wrote Heather Sher, a doctor who treated Parkland victims. A high-velocity AR-15 bullet leaves the liver looking like “a melon smashed by a sledgehammer.” It deletes the organ.
Why do bullets like that even exist outside war?
I have begun to think that a large segment of Americans have a kind of mass psychosis, a faith in weaponry that can only be called a cult. Guns are what President Trump likes best. Is there anything more damning?