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Trump On Twitter: ‘I Never Said Give Teachers Guns’ But Highly-Trained Teachers ‘Much Less Cost Than Guards’

By Paula Mooney
Published on: 00:49 PST, Feb 22, 2018

President Donald Trump is hitting back on Twitter, one day after Trump held a listening session in the White House with teachers and students about the mass shootings that have plagued the nation. In the State Dining Room, Trump listened to a variety of people, including some survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as well as parents and educators. Trump agreed with the notion that arming some teachers in schools was something to be considered. After Trump agreed that a possible solution for preventing more deaths in school shootings could be to arm certain teachers with guns and use military veterans as security personnel, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, the notion received a big response online and beyond – and not all of the feedback was positive.

Certain teachers did not like Trump’s idea of arming educators with guns in schools, as reported by the Huffington Post. Educators called for more effective solutions that did not involve bringing more guns into schools, but urged solutions that prevented people who want to kill children and teachers from getting guns in the first place. After the backlash, Trump took to Twitter to clarify his remarks about teachers and guns.

As seen in the above tweet, published to Trump’s Twitter account on Thursday, February 22, at 7:26 a.m., Trump wrote that he never said, “give teachers guns.” Trump went on to call CNN and NBC “fake news” and clarified that he stated looking at the option of allowing 20 percent of teachers – “only the best” – to carry concealed guns into schools.

Trump spoke of arming teachers who were adept at shooting, with “military or special training experience,” in order to “immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions.” Trump went on to write that teachers with a high amount of training could deter “cowards” that wreak havoc and cause violence in school and could represent “far more assets at much less cost than guards.”

Trump went on to criticize the notion of gun-free schools and wrote that school shootings last approximately three minutes on average, while it takes emergency personnel anywhere from five to eight minutes to arrive at the site of a crime.

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