President backs NRA offer of free gun lessons for teachers
DONALD TRUMP defended the National Rifle Association, America’s biggest gun lobby, yesterday, saying it was led by “great people” who would “do the right thing” as he intensified his support for arming schoolteachers.
The US 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 NRA, last night offered free firearms training to schools to stop the “evil that walks among us”.
Mr 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.
Mr 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.”
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 semiautomatic weapon from 18 to 21.
Mr Lapierre stepped into the debate with a full-throated defence of the Second Amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. “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.”
However, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida and NRA supporter, criticised 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.”
Mr Trump floated the idea on Wednesday during a White House “listening session” with survivors of mass shootings in Florida, Columbine and Sandy Hook.
Andrew Pollack, who lost his daughter Meadow, 18, in the Florida shooting, said: “It should have been one school shooting and we should have fixed it. We as a country failed our children.
“I can’t get on the plane with a bottle of water, but we leave some animal to walk into a classroom and shoot our children.” ♦ Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman and another aide have been handed a new 32-count indictment by the Russian election meddling inquiry.
Paul Manafort and Richard Gates were accused of hiding income and defrauding banks. The indictment alleges that $75 million (£54 million) flowed through offshore accounts and that the US government was not made aware of financial interests overseas.
They are pleading not guilty to a similar charges brought last year by Robert Mueller, the special counsel.