Trump pushes guns in schools

President again calls for arming teachers, paying them bonuses

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday pressed his case for arming teachers to fight school shooters, despite widespread criticism, and for the first time suggested bonus payments for those who carry concealed firearms.

The president also called for making 21 the minimum age for buying long guns. Gun-rights groups oppose raising age limits beyond 18, but Trump insisted that he can sell the restriction to the “patriots” at the National Rifle Association. “I told them, we’re going to have to toughen” gun laws, Trump said, adding, “I really think the NRA wants to do what’s right.”

Trump elaborated on his ideas and other responses to last week’s Florida school massacre, starting with a series of earlymorning tweets and continuing at a White House roundtable on school safety with state and local officials. The televised session was much like one on Wednesday Online trolls threaten students who survived shooting NEWS PG 7 NRA begins pushback against further regulation of guns NEWS PG 7

that Trump hosted with people touched by school shootings.

Trump reserved most of his enthusiasm for bringing concealed-carry permits to American schools, to allow teachers, coaches and other officials to be armed against potential killers.

He repeatedly berated the practice of declaring campuses as “gun-free zones,” calling that an invitation to armed attackers. “We have to harden our schools, not soften them,” he said. “A gun-free zone to a killer or somebody who wants to be a killer, that’s like going in for the ice cream. That’s like ‘Here I am, take me.’ ”

His exuberance for the idea has seemed to build since a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 students and adults at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last week.

Since his campaign, Trump has mainly limited his talk of gun policy simply to a staunch defense of an absolute Second Amendment right to bear arms, but the pressure for action since the latest shooting has been intense.

Trump raised the proposal when he met Wednesday with a group that included survivors of the Parkland shooting. When he asked what students, parents and teachers thought of arming school personnel, a few raised their hands in support and a few against. Since then, however, several have spoken out in opposition.

By Thursday, nonetheless, Trump had turned into a hearty supporter of arming teachers. In tweets, he advocated for guns in schools and espoused several ideas in other posts, including raising the minimum age for certain gun purchases, bolstering the process of checking backgrounds of potential buyers and banning the so-called bump stocks that allow users of semiautomatic weapons to fire at a faster rate.

There was, in fact, an armed school resource officer assigned to protect students at Stoneman Douglas, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Thursday. During a news conference, Israel said he suspended School Resource Deputy Scot Peterson, 54, on Thursday after seeing a video from the school that showed Peterson taking a defensive position outside the building while the shooter was inside killing students and teachers.

When asked what the deputy should have done, Israel said: "Went in and addressed the killer. Kill the killer."

Peterson, 54, a resource officer at the school since 2009, resigned after Israel suspended him. Israel said two other officers have been placed on a restricted assignment pending an investigation.

In his midday meeting with state and local officials, Trump grew expansive on his ideas, and occasionally heated. He said he didn’t want “everybody standing there with a rifle” in America’s schools, but rather select, trained personnel with concealed weapons. He suggested without evidence that up to 40 percent of teachers could be armed. He then recommended that “we give them a little bit of a bonus” for bearing arms.

Trump did not address how to pay for the bonuses, school weapons or other proposals he is considering, except to say that the debate “isn’t so much about funding, it’s about common sense.”

By his focus on such ideas, Trump in recent days has steered the gun policy debate away from more ambitious proposals, notably one to revive a long-lapsed ban on assault rifles like the Parkland shooter used. The newly minted gun control advocates among Parkland’s teenage survivors have called for a ban. He opposes one.

Instead, the president has raised some ideas, like new regulations against bump stocks, that the NRA has expressed willingness to consider, and a few — like the age limit for buyers — that, he says, his gun-rights allies at the NRA can be persuaded to support. “They’re ready to do things,” he said. “They want to do things. They’re good people.”

On the NRA’s web site, a spokeswoman is quoted in opposition: “Passing a law that makes it illegal for a 20-year-old to purchase a shotgun for hunting or an adult single mother from purchasing the most effective self-defense rifle on the market punishes law-abiding citizens for the evil acts of criminals.”

The NRA’s longtime leader, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Confer- ence on Thursday, complained that liberals are trying to exploit the Florida shooting to advance their agenda. “It’s not a safety issue, it’s a political issue,” LaPierre said. “Their solution is to make you, all of you, less free. ... They want to sweep right under the carpet the failure of school security, the failure of family, the failure of America’s mental health system and even the unbelievable failure of the FBI.”

The idea pf arming teachers has met with concern from Republicans and Democrats, as well as school and law enforcement groups.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, agreed with a Parkland teacher who expressed opposition to the idea during a televised CNN forum on Wednesday night. “I don’t support that,” he told her, citing his concerns as a father of school-age children and “practical problems.”

Rubio explained, “Imagine in the middle of this crisis, and the SWAT team comes into the building, and there’s an adult with a weapon in their hands. And the SWATteam doesn’t know who’s who and we have another tragedy that was unnecessary.”

The Senate’s Democratic minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, expressed doubt that Trump will really push for proposals that the NRA opposes. When Trump has talked about gun restrictions in the past, Schumer noted, he “quickly dropped his support once the NRA opposed it. I hope this time will be different.”