Now is a good time to look back and ask was Trump right? He campaigned on allowing teachers to be armed for self-defense.
While campaigning in Tennessee on October 1, 2015, he was talking about an incident at Umpqua Community College where an armed man killed nine people on a gun-free campus. Trump responded with this: “I’ll tell you, if you had a couple of the teachers or someone with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off.”
A few months later Trump revisited the topic and said he will get rid of gun-free zones on schools. Per Washington Post:
"I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools, and — you have to — and on military bases," Trump said, to scattered cheers during a campaign rally on Thursday night. "My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day. There's no more gun-free zones."
Trump has repeatedly said that gun-free zones are a magnet for mentally ill shooters and that the recent mass shootings in Paris and California could have been prevented if more citizens were armed to protect themselves and others. For months, Trump has specifically called for the elimination of gun-free zones at military installments, but his call to do the same at schools appears to be a new stance.
Per Breitbart News:
The left went apoplectic over the suggestion that teachers should be armed to defend their lives and the lives of their children. Sen. Chris Murphy (C-CT), called the idea “sinister” and said Trump was only suggesting it because it was part of “doing the bidding of the gun lobby.” These are strange words when one considers that Murphy is a Senator from a state where 26 innocents were gunned down in a gun-free zone (Sandy Hook); a zone where the law-abiding teachers and staff were prohibited from having guns with which to shoot back if under attack.
Of course, Hillary Clinton recoiled at Trump’s idea of allowing teachers to carry guns for self-defense. After all her lamentations over school shootings and attacks on innocents in other gun-free zones TIME quoted her saying that arming teachers “[is] no way to keep us safe.”
For leftists like Sen. Murphy and Hillary Clinton, the solution is always more gun control, which means more the very laws that are failing to stop attackers now. In rare cases a leftist will even voice support for more armed school resource officers, but Marjory Stoneman Douglas High had an armed officer on campus at the time of the attack and the shooter simply circumvented him. And once the shooter avoided detection by that lone officer he could be confident that no one else could offer armed resistance.
Is this the left’s way to keep us safe? If it is, it is not working.
Very interesting that Trump established his stance on this very early on in his campaign. He left no doubt that he believes armed teachers would make a very different type of results in these situations on gun-free campuses.
What do you think? Should teachers be armed to help stop these situations before they become mass shootings?
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