There is a poll for fun and snark at the end of this diary.
Is it possible to reach conservatives and awaken any of them to Faux’s and the NRA’s intentional bamboozlement of their biggest fans? I’m going to try. In a previous comment, I listed reasons that came immediately to mind why we should not be arming teachers in schools. Other commenters added a few more to my list.
That list includes:
1) More guns = more gun accidents. Even cops and military literally shoot themselves in the foot sometimes. And elsewhere.
2) Bullets can go through doors, walls, windows, ceilings, floors, killing the unseen person on the other side.
3) One of you is murderous. One of you is not. Who will shoot first? Who will have an attack of conscience and pause?
4) Someone can come close while you’re distracted and take your gun away.
5) Even the well trained can have poor judgment and/or a hot temper.
6) Diane Sawyer did an investigation on this. Even the most experienced, trained shooters have a tendency to stand and draw their weapon while others are hiding or running away, drawing attention to themselves so that they are the first killed. Then the rest are left without defense anyway.
7) Bad guys may very well wear body armor.
8) Arriving cops may not be able to tell the good guys with guns from the bad guys with guns.
And now here’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who calls Trump’s plan a fantasy war game. He goes into a great deal more detail regarding how this would all (not) work out.
My transcription is below the video:
O'Donnell: …. When the press secretary was asked yesterday if the president favors former house speaker Newt Gingrich's idea to have 6 or 8 armed teachers in every school in America to engage in gun battles with school shooters, the press secretary said she had no idea.... Well, now we know the answer to that question.
Trump: It's called concealed carry, and it only works where you have people very adept at using firearms, of which you have many. It would be teachers and coaches. If the coach had a firearm in his locker when he ran at this guy, that coach was very brave, saved a lot of lives I suspect; but if he had a firearm, he wouldn't have had to run, he would have shot and that would have been the end of it.
O'Donnell: That would have been the end of it. That's Donald Trump's imagining of what might have been if one of the coaches at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had a gun last week, a handgun, when the bullets started flying. If he had a firearm, he wouldn't have to run, he would have shot and that would have been the end of it. We don't know which coach Donald Trump was talking about, because he obviously does not know the names of the three school personnel and the 14 students who were murdered last week. Those names were not on the short list of talking points that the president held in his hand during that meeting. The president might be talking about Aaron Feis, who was an assistant football coach. He ran toward the sound of the gunfire. His wife and daughter will bury him tomorrow. Aaron Feis was 37 years old. Or the president might have been talking about Christopher Hixon, the athletic director and wrestling coach. He was patrolling the school as a security guard when the shooting started. His funeral was today. Christopher Hixon leaves behind his wife and four children. Christopher Hixon was 49 years old. Or the president could have been talking about 35-year-old Scott Beigel. He was a geography teacher and track coach. He followed the school security protocol and stayed at his classroom, protecting his students; and that's where he was killed, and several of his students said that Scott Beigel personally saved their lives.
If he only had a gun. That's what the president thinks. If one of those coaches had a gun, the president believes he would have fired that gun and that would have been the end of it. That's the way this fantasy war game plays out for everyone who thinks it's a good idea to give schoolteachers an extra job, an extra job that no one has suggested they be paid for, the job of police officer.
The people who suggest that all ignore that there was a police officer at the school, and it is a very big high school, with multiple buildings, over 3000 students, and a police officer assigned to the school every day. And that police officer did his best. But it didn't turn out to be as easy as Donald Trump imagines. The police officer has to find the shooter. The police officer's hearing has to be perfect, has to tell him exactly where the bullets are coming from. He can't be faked out by echoes of firearm blasts. He has to instantly know exactly where the shots are coming from, he has to go right to that spot where the shots are coming from, and then stand there and aim his handgun at the shooter with the assault weapon, and then just kill the shooter.
In Donald Trump's world, to do that, the teacher or the police officer with the gun has to be very, very lucky. The shooter would have to allow him to do it. The shooter would have to decide not to fire his assault weapon at the teacher with the gun, or the teacher would have to be lucky enough to come up behind the shooter with the assault weapon, and the teacher would have to be lucky enough that there is absolutely no one else in their space, that the shooter and the teacher are alone in the hallway or the classroom so that when the teacher fires his handgun the only possible person hit is the shooter. There can't be dozens of students huddled on the floor behind the shooter, or dozens of students or teachers running away from the shooter, because all of them could be hit by the teacher's bullets. Simple minds always imagine the ideal scenario for their imagined hero to take down a suicidal shooter with an assault weapon and high-capacity magazines moving through hallways in a school. Of course Donald Trump isn't naïve enough to think that any teacher could handle this job of being the secret campus cop who always has the concealed handgun ready to go against the assault weapon.
Trump: This would only be obviously for people who are very adept at handling a gun, and it would be, it's called concealed carry, where a teacher would have a concealed gun on them. They would go for special training.
O'Donnell: So teacher training would not be enough for these teachers. They would have to go for special firearms training. Donald Trump and Republicans in government would be unwilling to pay for that training. President Trump's own budget cuts money for school security. Republicans cut the overall funding of the United States government by a trillion and a half dollars with their tax cuts. They didn't leave any money for training teachers to use firearms in shootouts with mass murderers who have assault weapons. And that is a very complex form of firearms training. That is not going to a firing range and aiming at the classic hanging stationary target. That is more specialized than the firearms training that most police officers in America actually get.
Now let's just assume that the teacher with a gun gets exactly the same amount of training as the police officer with a gun. And let's remember that's taking time away from the rest of that teacher's duties as a teacher, to do that firearms training. But let's just assume that that happens, that we train teachers just as much as trained police officers. Here's something that Donald Trump doesn't know: Most bullets fired by trained police officers miss their targets most of the time. And they miss their targets by wide margins for many reasons, but mostly because the target isn't cooperating with being shot. The target isn't stationary, the target is moving. And there is no form of training that duplicates the human experience of going up against a real assault weapon that has already blown off the faces and the arms and the legs of children who were alive just moments ago. There is no form of training that duplicates the emotional psychological experience that a teacher would go through when going against an assault weapon that has already killed his students and is now aimed at the teacher who is armed with a handgun. Teachers are not going to be more accurate in their use of handguns than trained police officers are. Teachers would miss the target probably more often than police officers do. Teachers would miss their target most of the time, just like police officers. And what would teachers hit? Donald Trump would put teachers in the position of firing a handgun under unimaginable pressure and possibly killing one or more of their own students in the process by mistake.
And then would come the aftermath that the police departments are very familiar with, the wrongful death lawsuits. State and local governments pay out hundreds of millions of dollars a year as compensation for bad shootings by trained police officers. Hundreds of millions of dollars. The federal government doesn't cover one penny of that. Donald Trump's government is not going to cover one penny of any settlement involving a teacher mistakenly, tragically shooting a student, wounding a student, or killing a student or several students. Teachers will not be able to buy insurance policies that protect them from those risks. No insurance company would ever take that business.
Donald Trump does not know who teachers are. He doesn't know what they actually do. He has never been a teacher, he is not related to a teacher. It is not the type of work that his kids would ever be drawn to. By all reports he paid no attention at all to his own kids' education.... Donald Trump imagines that... coaches... are all eager to conceal a handgun so that they can take on the next shooter with an AR-15. Here's how many teachers that Donald Trump thinks should go to work tomorrow carrying a handgun.
Trump: So let's say you had 20% of your teaching force, because that's pretty much the number.
O'Donnell: Okay, 20%. That's 700,000 teachers in America who need to go to school tomorrow with a concealed handgun because according to Donald Trump, all they have to do is shoot the guy, because it's always a guy with the assault weapon, and that would be the end of it. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has about 140 teachers, coaches and administrators. So that means 28 of them would have to show up to work every day carrying their concealed handguns, 28 of them would have to be ready to run toward the sound of the assault weapon, and of course each one of those 28 teachers with their handguns would have to always know the exact movements of the other 27 teachers with their handguns, so that they don't fire in such a way that they could shoot each other. They would have to know where each of those 28 handguns are every second, so that students don't get caught in the crossfire of those 28 handguns that Donald Trump imagines could have been fired at that shooter last week.
Usually when police officers respond to shooting incidents like this, they don't immediately run into the building and run toward the sound of the assault weapon, they coordinate, they have radio communication, they try not to make a move without knowing what every other armed police officer is doing, without knowing where every other armed police officer is, they have body armor, and even when covered in body armor, sometimes they don't immediately confront the shooter. And you're not going to want to be the teacher in the school running around with a handgun when the SWAT team enters that school looking for the mass murderer. There is a very real risk that teachers with the handguns would be shot by the SWAT team who don't know that those teachers are the good guys.
The president obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. He didn't meet with some survivors and parents of victims of school shootings today to find a solution to America's mass murder epidemic. He went into that room in the White House with simplistic talking points written for him by White House staff and he echoed those talking points. The idea of teachers carrying guns was just another political smokescreen from another politician who wants to continue to make sure that American mass murderers can continue to very easily obtain assault weapons, and super-sized magazines, and unlimited amounts of ammunition. Donald Trump wants to use the idea of teachers with guns as a solution, a real solution to the problem of school shooters, so that there would be no need to ban assault weapons now that teachers have guns. The president didn't say one word about assault weapons today, and that is the issue for most of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who have been stepping up to microphones, including Sam Zeif, who was at that meeting with the president today.
Sam Zeif: I don't understand why I can still go into the store and buy a weapon of war, an AR. I was reading today that a person, 20 years old, walked into a store and bought an AR-15 in 5 minutes with an expired ID. How is it that easy to buy this type of weapon? How did we not stop this after Columbine, after Sandy Hook? I'm sitting with a mother that lost her son and it is still happening. In Australia, there was a shooting at a school in 1999. You know after that, they took a lot of ideas, they put legislation together, and they stopped it. Can anyone here guess how many shootings there have been in a school since then in Australia? Zero. We need to do something and that's why we're here.
O'Donnell: Faux News doesn't cover what happens in Australia, so that is probably the very first time that Donald Trump heard that. Even some people who own AR-15s have changed their minds this week about those weapons. There are YouTube videos now of owners of AR-15s destroying them, cutting them in half and saying proudly, “Now we have one less AR-15”. That's what the massacre in Florida did to them to change their minds. But not one Republican has changed his or her position on assault weapons. Not one politician who takes money from the NRA, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, has changed his or her opinion on assault weapons. Mike Pence and Donald Trump, sitting in that room today with survivors and families of victims, have not changed their positions on assault weapons, and the only idea that Donald Trump offered today was what to do when the assault weapon shows up at your school, as it inevitably will as long as Donald Trump and the NRA get their way and assault weapons continue to be so easy to get that most of our mass murderers walk into a store and buy them legally and then fill up their magazines and start ripping apart the faces and bodies of children in our schools.
Donald Trump's solution is to do absolutely nothing to keep the assault weapon out of the school, to keep the assault weapon out of the hands of the mass murderer who can pass a background check, which of course is most of them. His solution is to put a much weaker and inaccurate handgun into the hands of the teachers, who he thinks can just stand there and shoot the mass murderer, and that will be the end of it. Donald Trump and every other politician who take money from the NRA is going to make sure that the mass murderers that enter our schools will still be the best equipped mass murderers in the world. They will still be able to get assault weapons, super-sized magazines, and unlimited amounts of ammunition. Weapons of war will continue to come into our schools because Donald Trump and Republican politicians refuse to restore the assault weapons ban that for 10 years in this country actually did reduce mass shootings in America.
Please feel free to reprint this in whole or in part, with attribution to the transcriptionist. I’d like to see it spread. Perhaps it will give pause to a few enthusiastic Rambo types.