President Trump, master of distraction, will do anything but actually deal with gun violence.

The first (and only) time I was in close-quarter combat, I got tunnel vision. It happened so fast that when I went to squeeze the trigger, my safety was still on. In that instant, I almost panicked, thinking my weapon had jammed. Then the training kicked in. I flipped the selector switch to semi and started shooting.

It was over in seconds. My full field of vision returned, and an otherwise quiet evening in northern Iraq became bodies, broken glass, empty shell casings and ringing ears.

Seven years of training led up to that moment. How to react had been drilled into me. And still, I was caught so off guard by the attack that my reflexes had failed initially. It was nearly fatal.

I wasn’t perfect that night, but my years of training — our years of training, in the military — helped get us through the moment. Without it, the situation wouldn’t have been survivable.

Fast forward to last week. A disturbed individual murders 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school using a weapon nearly identical to the one I used.

In response on Wednesday, President Trump proposed arming teachers in the classroom.

Thursday morning on Twitter, bristling at criticism, he doubled down on the idea, calling it a “GREAT DETERRENT” and pledging “ATTACKS WOULD END.” He insists that homicidal-suicidal maniacs are “cowards” who would be intimidated by the prospect of a teacher wielding a weapon. “Problem solved.”

Arming educators is a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons, but I want to hone in on a crucial one: the fiction that arming teachers means they’ll be able to stop an armed attacker.

We hear this over and over. In speaking Wednesday, the President said, “If the coach had a firearm in his locker when he ran at this guy . . . he would have shot and that would be the end of it.”

Unfortunately you just can’t make that assumption. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV.

There were armed guards at Columbine, the Pulse nightclub and in Las Vegas at the time of the massacre. At Parkland too. Time and again, armed civilians or security guards are out-maneuvered, out-gunned and too inexperienced. It’s difficult for a rational person to reach a state where they can go toe-to-toe with an armed psychopath who has nothing to lose. I was professionally trained and still almost blew it at the moment of truth.

If armed security guards often don’t stop shootings, teachers have no chance.

Here’s why: Instructing a teacher in how to use a gun does very little. Guns aren’t magical objects that turn a person into a skilled warrior, no matter how proficient one is at marksmanship.

Gun fighting is less about the weapon and more about a state of mind. It’s about will. The will to assert yourself over — and kill — your armed adversary who wants to kill you. Developing this mental skill takes months or years of dedicated training, and a singular focus that teachers don’t, and shouldn’t, have.

Teaching someone to handle a gun is a very different skill from teaching them how to fight. People who haven’t fought (or at least been trained to fight) often seem to miss this completely.

You can teach someone the basics of marksmanship pretty quickly — like how to be safe and how to hit a target. But you can’t quickly teach them to fight and kill reflexively and instinctively.

Most importantly, you can’t quickly train them to stand their ground when faced with a mortal threat. That’s a completely different skill.

Normal humans seek to flee, evade and hide at the sound of gunfire at close range. If you think you’re going to teach Mrs. Adams or Coach Peterson to react effectively in a gun battle after a weeklong firearms course, you're kidding yourself. It takes years of focused training.

Anyone who tells you that arming teachers is a solution is clueless. It’ll cost kids’ lives. Teachers need to be teaching, not training to fight. But they’re up against weapons of war. And that’s on us.

Rather than arming teachers to shoot back, the more obvious solution is to prohibit the sale and ownership of weapons like the AR-15. And hopefully we will. Soon.