Annie Git Your Gun!

Trump: “The headline was Trump wants all teachers to have guns. Trump wants teachers to have guns. I don’t want teachers to have guns. I want highly-trained people that have a natural talent, like hitting a baseball or hitting a golfball or putting."

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 26, 2018

We just need Annie Oakley in the classroom!

Some of this just bears repeating:

“You have to be trained to want to get up and go into fire, that’s what the armed forces does for you,” Nance said. “I went through SWAT officer training when I got out of the military, and the first thing they do is they teach you is to really lock up and then move in on a target. That’s what active shooter training is for in law enforcement. But if you’re not really trained, you’re not proficient, it’s not like in the movies. The movies have nothing to do with reality. You’re putting yourself where you can be killed.”

Ruhle pointed out that mass shooters frequently used military-style firearms to carry out massacres, which would put teachers armed with concealed weapons at a distinct disadvantage.

“We have a lot of people going on, you know, what they think they see in the movies,” Nance said. “If you’ve got a handgun and that’s all the tool you have, you have to be extremely well trained to go out and engage someone who has a fully automatic or semiautomatic weapon.”

He said movies did not adequately depict what a real firefight would be like.

“Depending on the distance that you’re away, civilians don’t understand, in close quarters, the first thing you have to experience is the explosive sound of the weapon going off — not yours, the shooter’s,” Nance said. “It practically deafens you in an urban environment, inside a school building or something like that. It’s not like in the movies, where can you hear. It’s like somebody stabbing your ear a knife. If you can get past that and still move you’ll be conducting a gun battle, a firefight with people running back and forth in front of you. It’s just — unless you’re very skilled soldier or a police officer who has already been through that, through simulation or an actual incident, you cannot even start to predict the effect. ”

Even if the teacher managed to survive a firefight with a shooter armed with a high-powered rifle, they’d face danger once law enforcement arrived.

“If you are a teacher who thinks you’re doing a defensive, you know, pose and protect a student, law enforcement will just assume you’re the shooter,” Nance said. “If we start introducing five, 10 guns into that school, the complexity of target identification and clearance and knowing whether that individual is safe or whether they’re actually complicit and waiting for you to turn your back, it’s absolutely mind-boggling. Law enforcement will go the default — which is to shoot the person with the gun.”

Like, oh, you know, this:

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun.

Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition.

In addition to being overworked and underpaid, I want to be the one the police shoot at by mistake.

Gov. Jay Inslee, responding to Trump's comments to the governors:

“I have listened to the biology teachers, and they don’t want to do that at any percentage,” Inslee said. “I’ve listened to the first-grade teachers who don’t want to be pistol-packing first-grade teachers. I’ve listened to the law enforcement officials who say they don’t want to train teachers as law enforcement agencies, which takes about six months.”

The man who would bravely charge an armed gunman didn't think much of that:

Yes, that's Trump listening to the comments of Gov. Inslee.

So, sure, school districts which can barely afford teachers (West Virginia, represent!) will pay bonuses for the training it takes to carry firearms and use them to shoot people, training which better take refreshers (at least).  We really shouldn't be having this discussion, because it really doesn't get any stupider than this.

The best response to this gambit is to ridicule-then-pivot.

"That's a stupid and unserious proposal, & we know they don't mean it because they haven't introduced it as actual legislation. There are real bills that congress can pass right now. Let's finally talk about them. 9/?

— davekarpf (@davekarpf) February 23, 2018