Can We Just Talk for a Minute About the Armed Security Guard Who Bailed During a School Shooting

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | February 23, 2018 |

Our Dumbass in Chief is at the CPAC Conference today giving a speech in which he reiterated the need for teachers to carry concealed weapons, an idea that almost no one supports, save for the NRA.

Trump's musings about arming teachers have now been put in a formal speech.

"People that are adept at weaponry and guns - they teach!" he says.

He says he doesn't want armed guards around the schools, so "you do a concealed carry permit."

"This would be a major deterrent."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 23, 2018

Trump says he'd rather have armed teachers than armed cop-guards who don't know the kids.

"These teachers love their students. And these teachers are talented with weaponry, with guns…And I'd rather have somebody that loves their student and wants to protect their students."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 23, 2018

Trump on Nikolas Cruz: "A teacher would've shot the hell out of him."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 23, 2018

That tweet saying he doesn’t want armed guards but would rather have armed teachers who love their children was a veiled shot at Deputy Scot Peterson, who was armed and in uniform during the Parkland school shooting but never went in. That guy was placed on leave, and he has since not only resigned but apparently, he has retired.

Peterson is getting a lot of shit from a lot of people, including Trump and Fox & Friends this morning, and I think we’d like to think we’d all make a different choice, but would we have? A handgun vs. an assault weapon that can unload 60 rounds a minute? Peterson could have been a hero, but he’d have been a dead hero. I think the security guard did what a lot of people would do in that situation: He decided he didn’t want to die. And he’s being humiliated and excoriated for making that decision, and I have no doubt that he feels like a terrible human being today. But also, he gets to be a human being. I bet his family is glad he didn’t run it, too.

I'm sure that security guard will never forgive himself. But the real lesson is not to fall for bullshit macho fantasies of the physics teacher going Clint Eastwood on the shooter and dropping him cold in the hallway before he kills anyone. Almost never how it works.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 22, 2018

Trump probably is right that teachers would be more likely to run toward the gunfire rather than away — I mean, the football coach, Aaron Feis, allowed himself to be a human shield. If Feis had had a gun, he might have got a shot off before he was gunned down. Maybe he hits the shooter; maybe he doesn’t. But Hannah — a school teacher herself — did a magnificent job of explaining why that calculus doesn’t work.

A handgun vs. an AR-15 isn’t a fair fight, and teachers can’t carry concealed AR-15s, so it still goes back to the most logical solution here: Banning AR-15s, and not just the sale of them. The ownership of them. If I had my druthers, I’d make the manufacturers and the NRA buy them all back.

And you hate to go there, but you absolutely have to go there, because this is the reality: There are a LOT of great teachers in America, but there are some “bad apples,” too, and as Chris Rock notes in his latest stand-up special, you don’t want “bad apples” carrying guns.

One of my teachers threw a chair at the head of a classmate, and a security guard broke a girls arm. I cannot imagine how many dead black, Brown, and/or disabled students would result from arming teachers and staff. Let alone that being an obviously ineffective measure
— DarkSkintDostoyevsky (@daniecal) February 21, 2018

But Peterson? I’m sure there are a lot of parents in Parkland who hate him right now, parents who would have done anything for their kids. But would they have done the same for other people’s kids? Would you have left your kids fatherless or motherless over maybe a 15-20 percent chance that you could’ve stopped the rampage?

What I do know is that I don’t want to have to put teachers through boot camp so that they can teach my kindergartners how to read.

#CNNTownHall As a teacher, I’m letting you know I’m not carrying a gun to work. I’m not bringing guns around my children. I am not a police officer or in the army for a reason, I teach kids — I don’t go to war every day. My job is to educate children.
— skye l. (@skyelorenn) February 22, 2018

Dustin is the founder and co-owner of Pajiba. You may email him here or follow him on Twitter.

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Can We Just Talk for a Minute About the Armed Security Guard Who Bailed During a School Shooting

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