President Trump told a gathering of parents and survivors of the Parkland Florida shooting at the White House this week that “20 percent of your teaching force” should be armed in order to prevent gun violence in schools in America.
This isn’t a rational proposal. It’s madness.
If you take the 3.2 million teachers we have in public schools alone, 20 percent is more than 600,000 teachers. We don’t even have 600,000 soldiers in the Infantry in our Army. We have only 480,000 rifle-carrying soldiers out there to defend us from foreign enemies. If you add in the 500,000 teachers in private schools, and 1.5 million on college faculties, because they’re in the nation’s “teaching force” too, that’s a total of 5.2 million people teaching students in this country every day. Trump wants to arm 20 percent of them. That’s over 1 million teachers he wants out there carrying loaded weapons in classrooms every day.
We have about 1.4 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on active duty as of Jan. 31. So President Trump wants to arm a number of teachers nearly as large as the entire armed forces we have defending us from foreign armies. All of this to defend against the next flaming asshole who walks into a school or college carrying an AR-15 and starts shooting.
It’s hard to know where to begin with the questions. What does he propose arming all of these teachers with? Handguns? I’ve already seen quotes from teachers saying they aren’t going to go up against some shooter with a semiautomatic AR-15 of the type used in Parkland Florida last week. An AR-15 is an extremely accurate rifle capable of carrying magazines holding between 30 and 100 rounds of ammunition. It fires rapidly with a low recoil and can be fired continuously until the magazine runs out, and then it can be rapidly reloaded and fired again. And again. And again. A handgun, even a Glock or other semiautomatic, typically holds nine to 15 rounds and is very difficult to shoot accurately, even a short distance away from a target.
A handgun versus an AR-15 is not what you’d call a “fair fight.”
We don’t ask our soldiers to go to war carrying handguns against enemies armed with AK-47s (in fact, we often give them air and artillery support). Why would we ask teachers to use a handgun against a shooter with an AR-15?
It’s madness. All of it. Madness.
Who’s going to train this force of over a million armed teachers? The Army spends 10 weeks on Basic Training of recruits in order to begin to get them ready to be soldiers. They aren’t finished at 10 weeks, however. They spend another 14 to 16 weeks on Advanced Individual Training (AIT) of soldiers before the Army figures they’re ready to take up a position in an Infantry unit. That’s about 24 weeks of training — six months before the Army determines that a soldier is prepared to be issued an M-16 or an M-4 and take up those arms against enemy soldiers.
Army training on weapons is extensive. In Basic Training, a recruit will spend several days learning to handle a rifle safely. They learn to take it apart and reassemble it, how to clean the weapon and care for it so that it will shoot safely. All of this before a soldier even lays eyes on a bullet or a firing range. Then soldiers are taken to firing ranges and taught to fire an M-16 or an M-4 from several positions: prone, standing, kneeling, and seated with knees bent. Soldiers are then put through days of practice firing at targets from fixed positions before they are trained to fire their weapons while moving, either in a standing position or on the ground. Soldiers are taught how to safely drop from a standing position to a prone position carrying a loaded weapon without firing it accidentally. When this training is completed, soldiers are tested on marksmanship. All of this happens during Basic Training.
It’s not until they reach AIT that soldiers are taught to fire their weapons in situations replicating combat — that is, in situations that simulate facing an armed enemy, much as teachers would encounter if a shooter attacked a school. This training is difficult and dangerous. Before soldiers are issued live ammunition, they are put through drill after drill simulating combat. They are taught to move from position to position with their rifles in the company of other soldiers similarly armed. They go through this repetitive training because the first rule the Army wants soldiers to follow is not to shoot each other.
Training is continuous in the military, on firearms and everything else. It goes on 52 weeks a year. Trips out to the firing range for rifle practice can take place every two or three months. And at least once or twice a year in the Infantry, soldiers practice live-fire exercises.
After extensive training at fire and movement — imagine aiming a gun in a classroom of 25 or so students, or walking armed into a hallway crowded with panicked students — soldiers are issued live ammunition and put through live-fire exercises.
When I was at West Point, we went through a live-fire exercise in our second year when we spent eight weeks of advanced training at Camp Buckner, near the Academy. I remember that day as if it were yesterday, because a major picked me to be in charge of our cadet training company during that exercise, and it scared the shit out of me.
There I was at 19 being ordered to command about 125 of my fellow cadets as we went through a live-fire attack on a hill that was our “objective,” or our target. Everyone was issued live rounds and loaded their magazines. I had to come up with a plan to bring the entire company, in the form of four platoons of three squads each, eight to 10 men to a squad, on an imaginary line and advance through the woods to a clearing where we would begin firing live ammunition at the hill. The whole time, all of us would be carrying loaded M-16s.
We had been through training on how to move safely with loaded weapons, training on how to assume prone and kneeling firing positions. All of it. Yet now next to us, to our lefts and rights would be classmates who held loaded weapons just like we did. Nobody wanted to stumble and have his weapon fire accidentally. “Accidental discharge of a firearm” in training was an offense you could be punished for under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not to mention an incident that might result in wounding yourself or a fellow cadet. The whole thing was scary. And I was put in charge of making certain that none of the terrible things we had been taught about would happen. Nobody would get shot. Nobody would accidentally discharge his firearm.
Well, to make a long story short — with all of the preparation, the exercise took about four hours — no mistakes were made. Everyone fired their M-16s at the hill, not at each other. But training accidents happen in the military all the time. Between June and October of 2017, Military Magazine found that 56 members of the armed forces had died in “non-combat incidents.” Some died in naval accidents involving warships in the Pacific. Some died in helicopter crashes in training. But some died in training involving firearms.
Guns are fucking dangerous. Pistols are fucking dangerous. Rifles are fucking dangerous. Anything that has a trigger and shoots a bullet is fucking dangerous. Guns kill people. That’s what they’re designed to do. Army M-16s and a civilian AR-15s — which are basically copies of the military rifle without automatic fire capability — are designed and manufactured to do one thing: kill people. The .223 caliber bullets they fire are comparatively small, but they hit the human body with such force that they do incredible damage to muscle tissue and organs, far more damage than bullets fired even by powerful handguns like 9 mm Glocks.
But you want to know what’s really scary about guns, especially rifles like the AR-15? Guns, and only guns, make it possible to kill people you are not physically close to. If you’re using a knife, or a sword, or a big lead pipe, you’ve got to be right up against someone to kill him. Not with an AR-15. You can be across the room. You can be down the hall. You can be on top of one hill, and your target can be on top of the next hill, and you can hit the target and kill him. The sole purpose of a gun is to project deadly force away from you. Not next to you. Away from you. Far away from you, if you want. An Army M-16 or a civilian AR-15 is deadly accurate out to about 300 yards. Internet forums for gun nuts claim expensive models of the AR-15 have an “effective range” of 500 yards. Who knows if that’s true? Who cares? You can walk into any gun store and buy a rifle like an AR-15 for about $1,000 that will kill someone who is a long, long distance from you. All you have to do in most states, like the state of Florida, is have a driver’s license and be 18 years old and you can buy one of these killing machines and walk out of the store and load it with bullets and start shooting.
It’s madness.
Trump thinks if we arm 20 percent of teachers, our schools will be safe. It’s not an idea, or a plan. It’s just one more form of gun madness pushed by outfits like the NRA. If there is a deadly shooting like the one in Parkland, Florida; or the one in Las Vegas, Nevada; or the one in Newtown, Connecticut -- in all of which the shooters used AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles — the NRA’s solution isn’t fewer AR-15s, it’s more guns. More guns in the schools. More guns on the street. Hell, I guess they want more guns in the hotels, and that will stop shooters like the one in Las Vegas, huh, boys?
What have we heard from Trump, and the NRA, and conservative Republicans after the Parkland shooting? Thoughts and prayers, natch. And praise for the almighty “first responders.” Yes, let’s heap praise on the guys who came in after the shooting was over. And how did these “first responders” arrive? Heavily armed with AR-15 style police rifles and semiautomatic pistols, clad in body armor, many of them wearing helmets and face shields.
So what about the 20 percent of teachers you want to arm, President Trump? You’ll be giving them — the goddamned teachers! — the job of being a “first responder.” Are they going to be wearing the body armor the cops wear when they show up? We don’t expect our police officers to go into these so-called “active shooter” situations in button-down shirts and chinos, or sleeveless dresses, do we? Then what about the teachers, all 20 percent of the nation’s “teaching force,” all 1 million teachers you’re saying should go to work every day carrying guns? Are you planning to have 20 percent of kindergarteners and second graders and sophomores and juniors and MFA students looking up there at the head of the class and seeing their teacher in cargo pants and an armored vest with an AR-15 slung over his or her shoulder? Huh? How are you going to do this? How are you going to give all 1 million of them the kind of training the military thinks is necessary before they send soldiers with loaded weapons out to face “active shooters” on the battlefield?
Then there is the chance teachers will end up killing kids instead of the shooter. Not even highly trained cops are necessarily skilled in using their weapons. Over a six-year period in Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune, “At least 2,623 bullets were fired by police in 435 shootings. In 235 of those incidents, officers struck at least one person; in another 200 shootings, officers missed entirely.” Police regularly fire a fusillade of bullets at suspects, even when they are unarmed. In the infamous New York shooting of Amadou Diallo, officers fired 41 bullets, striking him 19 times, but missing with 21 bullets. What’s going to happen when teachers, without the lengthy training cops go through, fire their weapons at a killer who is shooting back at them?
It’s madness. That’s what it is.
We’ve got 1.4 million in our armed forces on whom we’re spending almost a trillion dollars a year. Now we’re going to have another 1 million in our “armed teaching forces?” How much is our armed teaching forces going to cost us? A few hundred billion? Half a trillion? Whose taxes are you going to raise to pay for it?
It’s madness. Trump is sitting in the White House spewing NRA talking points, and there are 17 dead in Parkland, and in another few weeks, there will be another dozen dead somewhere else.
Meanwhile, you’ll be able to walk into a gun store or a “gun show” and plonk down a thousand dollars and walk out with an AR-15 just like the ones used in Parkland and Las Vegas and Orlando and Aurora and Newtown. Those AR-15s killed 188 human beings and wounded another 662.
It’s fucking madness and it’s got to stop.
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