In a first face-to-face exchange of its kind, anguished and fear-stricken students and parents on Wednesday urged President Donald Trump to “fix” America’s gun problem and keep schools safe from the grim spectacle of mass shootings.
At an hour-long nationally-televised “listening session” in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in a Florida school, Trump heard grief-stricken parents cry for the safety of their children attending schools.
“How many schools, how many children have to get shotIJ” asked an indignant Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was among the 17 killed at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, noting: “We’re here because my daughter has no voice — she was murdered last week, and she was taken from us, shot nine times.”
“It stops here, with this administration and me, because I’m not going to sleep until it’s fixed,” Pollack said.
Trump, along with the US Congress, is under mounting pressure for some swift action to deal with the scourge of gun violence by enacting rigorous and foolproof laws.
“We want to learn everything we can learn. Starting about two minutes after this meeting, we’re going to work. This is a long-term situation that we have to solve. We’ll solve it together,” Trump said, adding: “You have gone through extraordinary pain, and we don’t want others to go through the kind of pain that you’ve gone through. Wouldn’t be right.”
He promised to come up with tougher background checks and mental health screening for people purchasing guns.
However, one of the suggestions he appeared to quickly endorse, came in for prompt and sharp criticism at the meeting itself. It related to arming teachers in a bid to deter future mass shootings as first responders could take some time to reach the spot.
“If the coach (who was among those killed) had a firearm in his locker, when he ran at this guy — that coach was very brave, saved a lot of lives, I suspect — but if he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run,” Trump said, adding: “He would have shot, and that would have been the end of it.”
But some others attending the meeting shot down the idea, which came in for sharp criticism on TV shows subsequently. So much so, Trump took to Twitter to slam “Fake News @CNN & @NBC”, saying he never said “give teachers guns”. At the same time, he broadly defended the idea.
“What I said was to look at the possibility of giving “concealed guns to gun-adept teachers with military or special training experience – only the best. 20% of teachers, a lot, would now be able to …immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOUlD END!” he tweeted.