Malcolm Nance joined Stephanie Ruhle this morning to explain why Cadet Bone Spurs is wrong about arming teachers as a strategy against school shooters using AR-15s to mow down their classmates.
Point One: “You have to be trained to want to get up and go into fire, that’s what the armed forces does for you,” Nance explained. He related how SWAT is trained: "The first thing they teach you is to really lock up and then move in on a target. That’s what active shooter training is for in law enforcement."
In case it's not obvious by now, Nance also reminded viewers that "It’s not like in the movies. The movies have nothing to do with reality. You’re putting yourself where you can be killed.”
He expanded on that point, saying, “We have a lot of people going on, you know, 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."
Extremely well trained, or as stupid as Donald Trump. You make the call.
Nance went on in detail to describe the problems associated with gunfire in close quarters, including the damage it does to hearing. Assuming teachers got past that part, he explained, they'll find themselves in "a firefight with people running back and forth in front of you."
And that leads to the real problem, in Nance's view.
“If we start introducing 5, 10 guns into that school, the complexity of target identification and clearance and knowing whether that individual is safe or whether they’re actually complicit and waiting for you to turn your back, it’s absolutely mind-boggling. Law enforcement will go the default, which is to shoot the person with the gun.”
I'm just going to repeat this over and over and over again. All of the bluster about arming teachers is a distraction from the real problem, which is assault weapons, assault weapons, assault weapons. Period. Teachers don't need to be armed. Assault weapons need to be banned.
Update: Here is a shining example of what he is talking about:
