President Trump and the NRA have both voiced support for being sure good guys with guns are present in schools to fend off bad guys who enter the building to do harm.
On February 16, 2018—two days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting—Breitbart News reported Trump spoke repeatedly in support of arming teachers during the presidential campaign. He first raised the topic after the October 1, 2015, attack on Umpqua Community College (UCC), an attack in which an armed man entered a gun-free campus and killed nine people. Trump responded to the attack by saying, “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.”
Weeks later, during the October 28, 2015, presidential debate, Trump stressed that gun-free zones actually attract attackers who might avoid campus if they knew their would-be victims could shoot back. He said gun-free zones provide “target practice for sickos.”
Following this year’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School attack Trump called for “20 percent” of K-12 teachers to be armed. He stressed that first responders are “5 to 8 minutes away” when an attack occurs, but teachers are on scene to shoot sickos “immediately.”
The NRA has pushed this same solution to school shootings since the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman had over nine minutes of unarmed resistance to ply his bloody trade. Twenty-six innocents were killed at Sandy Hook and a week later NRA’s Wayne LaPierre observed, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
And NRA chief of staff Josh Powell made clear that the NRA’s focus is not limited to teachers being armed, but to a complete security approach. An approach that involves layers of armed protection we typically see at pro-athletic events, celebrity gatherings, and meetings for the political class. Powell asked, “At what point are we going to get serious enough about protecting our children and give the protections that all these other groups get?”
On March 20, an armed resource officer inside Great Mills High School responded to shots fired by engaging the gunman, thereby ending the attack very quickly. Fox News reports that the resource officer pursued and shot at the 17-year-old attacker, Austin Wyatt Rollins. The attacker responded by firing one round. Soon thereafter he was pronounced dead.
Investigators are working to determine whether the resource officer killed Rollins or if Rollins took his own life once cornered. Either way, the resource officer brought the attack to an end.
Two students were injured in the attack, one critically. But CBS News quotes Gov. Larry Hogan (R) praising the actions of the resource officer, observing that “the actions of the school resource officer may have saved others’ lives.”
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.