President Trump spent the on-camera portion of a meeting about school safety free associating on such topics as providing “a little bit of a bonus” to teachers who want to start packing heat and pontificating on the ways in which violent movies and video games influence school shooting incidents. It was about as enlightening as it sounds.
One of the more concrete policy proposals the president made during the meeting involved paying bonuses to teachers who want to carrying guns on the job.
“These people are cowards.” Trump said of school shooters. “They’re not going to walk into a school if 20% of the teachers have guns — it may be 10% or may be 40%. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that do carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus. They’ll frankly feel more comfortable having the gun anyway. But you give them a little bit of a bonus.”
JUST IN: President Trump suggests “a little bit of a bonus” for trained teachers who are armed. pic.twitter.com/hvxCX3VcgS
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 22, 2018
It’s worth noting that there was an armed guard at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during last week’s shooting, but he was unable to reach the shooter in time.
Trump stressed that all teachers shouldn’t feel obligated to start carrying weapons, just the ones who always dreamed of becoming expert snipers.
“I don’t want teachers to have guns. I want certain highly adept people — people that understand weaponry, guns,” Trump said. “If they really have that aptitude — because not everybody has aptitude for gun — but if they have the aptitude, I think a concealed permit for having teachers and letting people know that there are people in the building with guns, you won’t have — in my opinion — you won’t have these shootings.”
Trump’s takeaway was that gun-free school zones are infinitely more dangerous than schools where teachers are armed to the teeth.
“They see that as such a beautiful target,” Trump said of school shooters. “They live for gun-free zones.”
The president also expounded on some theories as to what causes gun violence in the first place. He was particularly concerned by what media children consume while their minds are still “being formed.”
“I’m hearing more and more people seeing the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” Trump said to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. “And then you go the further step, and that’s the movies. You see these movies, and they’re so violent a kid is able to see the movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved, and maybe we need to put a rating system for that.”
Here’s the video of Trump talking about video games and movie rating systems pic.twitter.com/OlsbLVO0yI
— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) February 22, 2018
First of all, the president is apparently unaware that there are rating systems for movies and video games already in place. Secondly, the concern for violence in movies is a bit rich coming from a guy who told his then 13-year-old son Eric to fast-forward to all the nut-smashing scenes in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1988 classic Bloodsport while sitting for a New Yorker interview . From the New Yorker:
We hadn’t been airborne long when Trump decided to watch a movie. He’d brought along “Michael,” a recent release, but twenty minutes after popping it into the VCR he got bored and switched to an old favorite, a Jean Claude Van Damme slugfest called “Bloodsport,” which he pronounced “an incredible, fantastic movie.” By assigning to his son the task of fast-forwarding through all the plot exposition—Trump’s goal being “to get this two-hour movie down to forty-five minutes”—he eliminated any lulls between the nose hammering, kidney tenderizing, and shin whacking. When a beefy bad guy who was about to squish a normal-sized good guy received a crippling blow to the scrotum, I laughed. “Admit it, you’re laughing!” Trump shouted. “You want to write that Donald Trump was loving this ridiculous Jean Claude Van Damme movie, but are you willing to put in there that you were loving it, too?”
Eric Trump is now a grown man, and we can assume he hasn’t gone around punching people in the face and kicking them in the groin after being repeatedly exposed to a violent martial arts flick while his mind “was being formed.”
Anyway, it sounds like the president has this whole situation under control.
