Trump: Give teachers guns, maybe bonuses for carrying
President says he can sell NRA on raising age limit on rifles
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 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 early-morning tweets and continuing later at a White House roundtable on school safety with state and local officials. The televised session was
much like one that Trump hosted Wednesday with people touched by school shootings. Both offered a rare window into the president’s seemingly off-the-cuff thinking on gun policy, one of the nation’s most contentious issues.
Trump reserved most of his enthusiasm for bringing concealedcarry 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,” Trump said. “A gunfree 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 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland last week. The administration had not previously floated the proposal. Since his campaign, Trump mainly has limited his talk about gun policy 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 publicly when he met at the White House on Wednesday with the group that included survivors of the shooting in South Florida.
When he asked what students, parents and teachers thought of the idea 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 four tweets, he advocated for guns in schools, and then espoused several other ideas in other posts, including raising the minimum age for certain gun purchases, bolstering the process of checking backgrounds of potential buyers and banning bump stocks, which allow users of semi-automatic 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.
In his midday meeting with state and local officials, Trump grew expansive — and occasionally heated — on his ideas.
He said he didn’t want “everybody standing there with a rifle” in America’s schools, but rather select trained personnel with concealed weapons.
“Frankly, you have teachers that are Marines for 20 years, they retire and become a teacher,” he said. “They’re Army, Navy, Air Force, they’re Coast Guard, they’re people who have won shooting contests for whatever, this is what they do. They know guns, they understand guns.”
Trump suggested without evidence that up to 40 percent of teachers could be armed. He recommended “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.”
With his focus on such ideas, Trump in recent days has steered the national gun policy debate away from more ambitious proposals, notably one to revive a long-lapsed ban on assault rifles. The gun-control advocates among Parkland’s teenage survivors have called for a ban. He opposes one.
Instead, the president has raised some ideas, such as new regulations against bump stocks, which the NRA has expressed willingness to consider, and a few — such as the age limit for buyers — that, he says, his gun-rights allies at the NRA can be persuaded to support.
On the NRA’s website, 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 lawabiding citizens for the evil acts of criminals.”
For Trump, the group likely would be a powerful ally for any expansion of concealed-carry laws to school employees, though the idea has met with concern from Republicans and Democrats, as well as school and law enforcement groups.
The Senate’s Democratic minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, expressed doubt that Trump will really push for the 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.”