President Donald Trump thinks he has the answer to school shootings: arm teachers.
‘If you had a teacher who was adept with the firearm,’ he said after the Florida massacre, ‘they could end the attack very quickly. They would be there and you would no longer have a gun-free zone. This would be a major deterrent because these people are inherently cowards. If the Florida gunman thought that other people would be shooting bullets back at him, he wouldn’t have gone there.’
In an NBC interview yesterday, Trump’s daughter Ivanka concurred: ‘I think that having a teacher who is armed who cares deeply about her students or his students and who is capable and qualified to bear arms is not a bad idea.’
Trump says arming teachers will help – and had teachers in Florida had guns, it may have been a big enough deterrent that the shooter never would have targeted his old school
In an NBC interview yesterday, Trump’s daughter Ivanka concurred: ‘I think that having a teacher who is armed who cares deeply about her students or his students and who is capable and qualified to bear arms is not a bad idea.’
Actually, it is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a shockingly bad abomination of an idea.
A few years ago, the New York City police department, the largest and best trained in America, conducted a detailed survey into their accuracy rates when firing guns.
In training, they were very high.
In real-life gunfights, there was a dramatic difference.
In 2005 for example, NYPD officers fired 472 times, hitting their target just 82 times. That’s a 17.4% hit rate.
Raymond Kelly, the New York police commissioner at the time, explained this was down to ‘the adrenaline flow, the movement of the target, of the shooter, the officer, the lighting conditions.’
In other words, when confronted by someone actually shooting real bullets, pressure, fear and unpredictable circumstances can have a hugely detrimental effect on even a firearm expert’s ability to shoot back accurately.
As retired NYPD police commander John Cerar told the New York Times:
‘You take Olympic shooters, and they practice all time, and they can hit a fly off a cow’s nose from 100 yards. But if you put a gun in that cow’s hand, you will get a different reaction from the Olympic shooter.’
It’s a variant on Mike Tyson’s theory about boxing: ‘Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.’
So, just imagine what accuracy rates would be like if the gun was in the hand of a teacher in a classroom full of terrified children as a lunatic bursts into a school and blazes away with an AR-15 assault rifle?
The shooter in that scenario is able to fire more than a bullet a second – and at least five times as fast as that if he has added bump stock to the AR-15.
We know the Florida shooter fired through the doors of some classrooms, not even bothering to enter.
What possible chance does a teacher have to neutralise someone like that in a situation like that, given the world’s most highly trained police marksmen have a smaller than one-in-5 success rate?
I would think there’s a far greater likelihood of the teacher accidentally killing a child in the chaos, or being shot themselves if the police arrive and don’t know who is supposed to be the actual shooter.
And where are the teachers supposed to keep their loaded weapons?
After Sandy Hook, a Texas gun store owner told me in all seriousness that female teachers should keep guns in their bras.
Can you think of anything more absurd, or dangerous?
To exemplify the futility of this ‘arm the teachers’ nonsense, consider the reaction of the armed security guard stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
(Yes, they had one, so no – it wasn’t a ‘gun-free zone’ as Trump claimed).
Scot Peterson was trained to fire his gun in active shooter situations, and specifically paid to do so to protect those children.
But when the time came, he froze.
There was an armed guard there. Scot Peterson, seen right, froze when the shooting happened, and stayed outside. He was terrified and called a coward by President Trump
Instead of racing inside to confront the shooter, he stayed outside.
So the ‘good guy with a gun’ did nothing to stop the ‘bad guy with a gun’.
Trump called him a coward, and I wouldn’t disagree.
Yet the truth is he was terrified of being shot dead because he knew he was up against a crazy kid with a rapid-fire assault rifle who didn’t care if he lived or not.
There are unconfirmed reports that three armed sheriff’s deputies also cowered outside rather during the shooting.
If true, this too is appallingly gutless.
Yet again, it illustrates how a human being’s reaction to a live shooter crisis can be very different to how they would react in training for one.
If armed guards and cops choke under fire, why the hell would anyone expect a teacher to do otherwise?
Reaction to Trump’s bonkers idea was swift and furious, yet in some cases no less disingenuous or worthy of scorn.
Reaction to Trump was swift – including this tweet from Samuel L. Jackson
‘Can someone that’s been in a gunfight tell that Muthaf*kka that’s never been in a gunfight the flaws of his Arm The Teachers plan?!’ tweeted Hollywood star Samuel L. Jackson.
Fine words from a fine actor.
Yet a little rich, you might think, coming from someone who has starred in endless movies that revel in gun violence.
Indeed, Jackson’s latest film The Hitman’s Bodyguard, in which he plays an assassin, is an unashamed ode to the joys of ultra gun violence.
A website called ‘Movie Body Counts’ lists Jackson’s current personal on-screen death tally as 77 including three victims in Pulp Fiction – one of the most gratuitously violent Hollywood films ever made.
Quentin Tarantino, who directed it, insisted: ‘Violence in real life is one of the worst aspects of America. In movies, violence is cool. I like it.’
Jackson’s latest film The Hitman’s Bodyguard, in which he plays an assassin, is an unashamed ode to the joys of ultra gun violence
Jackson’s current personal on-screen death tally as 77 – including three victims in Pulp Fiction – pictured here
Dear God, and we wonder why Hollywood’s warped morality has been so roundly questioned recently?
I loathe and detest the NRA with a passion. They are the most dangerous lobby group in America, and largely responsible for so much of the country’s grotesque adoration of guns.
But there is one opinion they regularly espouse with which I concur.
‘Hollywood makes billions promoting and glorifying gun violence, and teaching gun irresponsibility to the American public,’ said NRA president Wayne La Pierre. ‘They criticise me for saying people ought to be able to protect themselves from murderers, rapists and robbers and then they make billions depicting every night those same situations. The hypocrisy is beyond belief.’
He’s right. It IS rankly hypocritical.
Ironically, it was shamed mogul Harvey Weinstein who had begun to lead a resistance to his industry’s double standards.
He told me before his downfall that gun violence had become ‘an obsession and almost an addition’ for filmmakers and moviegoers, and vowed to never make another movie glorifying guns.
He was right too, and if Samuel L. Jackson really cares about gun violence then he should stop making movies that celebrate it.
There is only one solution guaranteed to reduce America’s gun death epidemic and that is the one so superbly articulated by the brave, bold students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
I interviewed one of them, Sam Zeif, on Good Morning Britain today and he said simply: “We need to get rid of the guns.’
It can be done.
Britain banned guns from civilian hands after the Dunblane school massacre in 1996 and we haven’t had a school shooting since. Australia banned assault weapons after the Hobart massacre the same year, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since.
America needs to wake up to reality that the No1 problem with its gun violence culture is not ‘people’, it’s the ready availability of guns.
As for President Trump’s ridiculous call to ‘arm the teachers’, I would urge him to consider the words of someone he described in a tweet last week as a ‘great American patriot’ who would ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to guns.
In 1999, after the Columbine High School massacre, that man told the membership of his own organisation:
‘We believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America’s schools. Period.’
Exactly.
Bravo that man!
Who was he?
Oh, it was Wayne LaPierre, President of the NRA.