President Trump held an emotionally fraught, painful “listening session” at the White House on Wednesday for survivors and next-of-kin of school shootings. Remarkably, his main takeaway from that session -- the proposal that he embraced most enthusiastically -- was that teachers, janitors and other adults in schools ought to be armed.
Which led to this truly bizarre tweet this morning:
He never said “give teachers guns,” he tweets, then proceeds to say “give teachers guns.” He continued:
So ... the solution to gun violence is guns. The solution to military-style assault weapons being used to murder large numbers of people is military-style teachers with military-style weaponry. It’s Mr. Smith -- a “very weapons-talented teacher” -- standing before his fourth-period English class, day after day, with a Glock strapped to his waist and two 10-round magazines stored in his desk drawer.
Have we come to that, America? Is that the country, the society, that we wish to become? It is certainly what the NRA wants us to be. The NRA envisions America as a fully armed society, with loaded weapons within an arm’s length at all times, in every situation, as a necessity for our personal safety. That is the reality that it is working to create. (Those weapons will of course be produced and sold by the manufacturers who are the NRA’s biggest financial backers.)
Let’s talk this through:
1.) The notion that an armed Mr. Smith would be a deterrent is nonsense on its face. Mass shooters are not merely prepared to die; most seem to welcome death and actively seek it as a means of escaping their own nightmare. None of them escape, not for long. So anyone who speaks of deterrence as a solution to mass shootings is not to be taken seriously. There is no deterrence, and expecting irrational actors to respond rationally is irrational in its own right.
2.) Mr. Smith is teaching because he wants to be a teacher. If he had wanted to be an armed police officer, if he wanted to undergo the extensive training in firearms and tactical situations that would be needed to become effective in that type of combat situation, he could have done so. He chose another course.
Trump’s suggestion that 20 percent of teachers would be willing to arm themselves and undergo the necessary training, and would be mentally, emotionally and physically capable of handling the responsibility, is nonsense. A more realistic number is probably more like one in 200 or 500, if that. Even the type of training that an infantry veteran receives -- basically, shoot everyone who might be a threat -- is of little or no use in the type of complicated tactical situations we’re discussing here. So again, if your notion of a solution is “large numbers of very weapons-talented teachers” in each school, then you propose no solution.
3.) According to Trump, the average school shooting lasts three minutes. The notion that Mr. Smith, teaching “Romeo and Juliet” in Room 308, is going to hear gunfire, leave his classroom students unprotected, proceed to the shooting scene somewhere else in the building, and then accurately identify, engage and neutralize the shooter -- his Glock against an AR-15, in a crowded situation with other students and teachers around -- within that three-minute window is again romanticized nonsense.
As one indication of the improbability of that scenario, remember that with police and SWAT teams swarming the scene, the shooter at Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High School escaped temporarily by throwing up his hands and blending into the student body as it fled.
4.) Trump’s right about this much: Mass killers do inflict huge casualties in a small window of time. They can do that because we give them easy access to military-class weaponry that is designed precisely to kill large numbers of human beings in a very small window of time, and for no other function. If those potential killers are denied the tool to wrack up a large body count, the temptation to do so diminishes considerably.
5.) What happens when Mr. Smith wades into a student fight in the hallway, with his gun strapped to his hip? What happens if he forgets to lock the gun in his desk, or leaves it on the sink in the restroom? Kids who find guns often end up either dead or as accidental killers. Statistics tell us that guns in the home are much more likely to be used against someone the homeowner knows or loves than against outside intruders. That would probably be true of schools as well.
6.) Think of your own high school experience and the people you encountered there. Remember your gym teacher? Would you want him to be walking the halls of the school armed? Your assistant principal? Your janitor?
7.) Our most recent Top 10 mass shooting occurred in a high school, so it’s understandable that much of the current debate is centered on schools. The problem is much larger than that. The previous Top 10 mass shooting -- 25 dead, 20 wounded -- occurred in a church. The one before that -- 58 dead, 500 wounded --- occurred at an outdoor concert. The one before that -- 49 dead, 50 wounded -- occurred in a nightclub.
All three took place in the last 19 months, and we can only imagine when and where the next will occur. We know only that it will.
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