On February 26, MSNBC Terror Analyst Malcolm Nance suggested that teachers are not ready to carry guns and that they would most likely be shot as police entered a building in the case of an attack.
Nance made these suggestions while being questioned by host Stephanie Ruhle.
Ruhle asked Nance what armed teachers would face. He responded by talking about military and police training, then shifted to teachers, saying, “It’s not like the movies. The movies have nothing to do with reality. You are putting yourself where you could be killed.”
Ruhle then asked what it would be like if an attacker brought an AR-15 and all the teacher had was a handgun.
Nance responded:
That’s really a matter of understanding and training. We have a lot of people who are going on what they think they see in the movies. 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 … and to be quit honest, depending on the distance that you’re away, civilians don’t understand [that] in close quarters the first thing you are going to have to experience is the explosive sound of the weapon going off, not yours but the shooters.
He went on to say that it is only after all these first obstacles that a teacher will actually get into a gun fight.
Missing from Nance’s assessment is any acknowledgment that teachers are already hearing the sound of the attacker’s gun, but they are doing it in an unarmed, defenseless posture. In other words, they are hearing it while trying to hold the door closed, while hiding under the desk at the shooter’s feet, while throwing books and erasers at the attacker, or while selflessly charging him as did Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung.
Right now, they are hearing the “explosive sound” of the gun and then dying, being injured, or psychologically traumatized. Why not let them hear it while they are holding a gun and at least have a fighting chance?
Nance continued by claiming arming teachers is a “ludicrous idea.” He said it is “the worst idea” he has ever heard. He said that when SWAT enters a school building after a 911 shooting call, they are checking hands and they are going to shoot if they see a handgun in a teacher’s hand.
He did not mention that schools know which teachers are and are not armed, and that information can be provided to SWAT teams beforehand. Moreover, he overlooked the fact that, in our current scenario, SWAT teams that come into rooms where mass shooters have been are often stepping over a teacher’s body: the body of a teacher that had no means of self-defense.
It should be noted that President Donald Trump is not just calling for armed teachers, but for teachers who undergo training to carry and use a gun in reaction to an attack on a school. Such training can be extremely intense, as with the FASTER program that prepares armed teachers in what must be done should a horrific attack occur.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
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