Arm the teachers, they say. The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, they say. There’s some derision to this plan because of the logistical and financial challenges. Unless Glock, Sig, and H&K are donating handguns, are we really going to pay to arm teachers when we won’t pay for [tissues | pencils | paper | all of the other classroom supplies teachers are self-funding]? Are the local police ranges going to be open for these individuals? Are Cor-Bon donating thirty million rounds of ammo a month (Think I’m joking? That’s LOW. There are some 100,000 public schools in the US. One armed dude isn’t going to help – what if he’s sick that day? Three per school is a low average. Say hundred bullets a month [most people I know who regularly train with firearms shoot at least fifty rounds a week]. 100,000 * 3 * 100 = 30,000,000 bullets.) But that’s the least of my concerns.
Trump stresses that these are well trained individuals. Trained how?!? A gun for home defense is a fairly controlled situation with a small number of well known ‘good guys’. Make sure you know where the spouse & kids are taking cover, and teach them to STAY STILL. While it’s more difficult to hit a moving target than a stationary one, range time is good practice. In a school hallway, where the teacher knows maybe a quarter of the students well … which one is the short-ish guy in a gray hoodie? And what happens when, amid the chaos, some innocent (panicking) kid runs into the path of a teacher’s bullet? Or the local kid who shut down the High School a few days ago with a toy gun (bright orange tip and everything) gets terminated to ‘save’ the rest of the students (and, yeah, totally dumb move taking a toy gun into school … but probably not something for which anyone deserves to die). What happens when these good guys with guns realize it’s hard to shoot another human being.
Unless this training includes hours of live fire exercises every month, “training” not going to help. But it does let politicians claim to have done something. And it does provide a convenient scapegoat for future school shootings — because public discourse shall not say “well, obviously a good guy with a gun isn’t helpful” but rather “what flaw in these people had them fail in saving the day?”