https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6f5ens
President Trump continues to seemingly talk out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to the subject of arming teachers with guns in classrooms. During his White House listening session on Wednesday afternoon, the president advocated giving teachers the right to concealed carry. “If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly,” he reasoned.
On Thursday morning however, he clarified his remarks on Twitter by claiming that he never said “give teachers guns” unless they happen to be “gun adept” or military trained teachers or coaches, which still sounds like “give teachers guns.” Likewise, during a meeting with state and local officials on school safety later in the afternoon, Trump struggled to make his position clear:
Frankly, I have been reading a lot about it, and I think when you allow a person who’s been in the marines for 20 years who’s done nothing but handle guns and handle them safety and well, because you can’t just give a teacher a gun. One of the fake news networks CNN was saying last night, ‘I want teachers to have guns.’ I don’t want teachers to have guns. I want certain highly adept people — people that understand weaponry, people that understand guns, if they really have that aptitude. Because not everybody has the aptitude for a gun. But if they have the aptitude, I think having a concealed permit for having teachers and letting people know that there are people in the building with guns, in my opinion, you won’t have these shootings, because these people are cowards, they’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns — it may be 10 percent, it may be 40 percent — and what I recommend doing is the people that do carry, we give them a bonus, we give them a little bit of a bonus. Frankly, they’d feel more comfortable having the gun anyway, but you give them a little bit of a bonus. So practically for free, you have now made the school into a hardened target.
Say what you will about Trump, but these were ninja-level acrobatics. He started off denying that he ever said he wanted teachers to have guns, to admitting that maybe “highly adept” teachers with “aptitudes for guns” should be permitted to conceal carry — and that this number could be as high as 40 percent of teachers — to finally proposing to offer bonuses to teachers who agree to carry guns.
He then adds that this solution is “practically free,” except for the part where school budgets have to find a way to cough up the money to buy teachers guns and then give them bonuses for doing so.
Pretty much the only thing in that long-winded bit of word salad that makes sense is “not everybody has the aptitude for a gun,” which is exactly the gist of many people’s gun-control arguments, not the dang algebra teacher packing heat.
(Via Fox News)