Ask questions later?
Shortly after President Trump, on Twitter, insisted “I never said ‘give teachers guns,’ ” his jaws locked on the idea like a dog sinks his teeth into a bone. He pledged that giving up to one-fifth of educators special training to carry concealed weapons would be a “GREAT DETERRENT” to school shootings.
“ATTACKS WOULD END!” overpromised the overpromiser, because the “cowards that do this” would be scared away, petrified that coaches and teachers might fire back.
Later in the day, Trump floated the notion of paying federal bonuses to incentivize Mr. and Ms. Chips to leap into action when the chips are down.
What’s wrong with creating semi-professional militias who are ready to transform into first responders if and when a deranged maniac shows up at the schoolhouse door with the AR-15 and high-capacity magazines Trump and Republicans refuse to ban? Where to begin?
One: It is nothing short of a dangerous delusion to believe that the presence of a few more guns in a school will frighten away the likes of Adam Lanza, Nikolas Cruz, Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, who together killed 88 human beings.
To a person, and perhaps by definition, young men who enter schools with intent to kill in bunches have a death wish. Far from being frightened by the prospect of dying in a bloody hail of bullets, they tend to relish it.
Indeed, Columbine High School had a professional armed guard on campus. So did Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. And the Pulse nightclub. Some deterrent effect.
Two: No matter how much training a teacher gets, he or she still has a singular duty to educate young people and shield them from harm.
To seek to convert some into hop-into-thephone-booth superheroes is to fundamentally misunderstand the mindset of both educators and cops. And it is to see the chillingly real hazards of engaging a shooter in a firefight through rose-tinted, Hollywood-hued glasses.
In the neighboring column, combat veteran Brandon Friedman explains that even a member of the military with years of training can find himself ill-equipped for his first firefight.
Then there are statistics, like the 37 years of data crunched by researchers at Stanford University last year. They found that states that make it easier for citizens to be armed in public had higher levels of violent crime than those that limited the right to carry.
Start digging through “good guy with a gun” stories, and you’ll find precious few cases of it working like it does in the movies.
Three: The presence of additional men and women wielding weapons in what is, to begin with, chaotic, hair-trigger crime scenes in progress will only complicate cops’ jobs when they do arrive, and make matters more lethal.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida — proud recipient of an A+ rating from the NRA — said precisely this in a CNN forum Wednesday night.
He declared the idea “not something that, quite frankly, I’m comfortable with,” raising the very real possibility that during an active shooter scenario, such a teacher could be mistaken for a threat: “the SWAT team doesn’t know who is who.”
Four: As Americans now know well, officers of the law have wider legal latitude than civilians do to employ deadly force. Sometimes they err — and tragedies happen.
If we as a nation arm teachers by the thousands, we would have no choice but to extend these protections to them as well. Are we prepared for the consequences?
Were Trump dealing honestly with this problem, he would wrestle publicly with these objections and others. Instead, watch him barrel through using caps and exclamation points.
Anything to avoid talking about the guns.