An armed sheriff’s deputy waited outside Stoneman Douglas High School for “upwards of four minutes” while a gunman was shooting, said Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. During seven minutes of gunfire, 14 students and three adults — a teacher and two coaches — were killed.
Israel said Deputy Scot Peterson, the school’s resource officer, should have gone in and “killed the killer.” Suspended without pay, Peterson resigned and then retired.
Armed deputies are guarding Peterson’s home.
In addition to the school resource officer, three other Broward County deputies were outside the building when Coral Springs police officers arrived and entered, sources told CNN. “The deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles, the sources said, and not one of them had gone into the school.”
Teachers and staff in Clifton, Texas, trained at a gun range in 2013 to qualify for a concealed-carry license. Photo: Lance Rosenfield/Education Week
President Trump wants to let “highly trained” teachers and coaches carry concealed weapons in school, reports USA Today.
During a “listening session” Wednesday with survivors of the Feb. 14 massacre in Parkland, Florida, Trump mentioned Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach and unarmed security monitor, might have ended the killing, if he’d had a gun. Feis died shielding students.
Arming teachers and staff would be a deterrent, Trump tweeted:
If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school.
Yesterday, he estimated that 20 percent of teachers might have the ability to “fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions.”
The idea of arming educators came in for heavy criticism.
“I don’t know of any police chief who believes this is a good idea,” said Richard Myers, executive director of a law enforcement group Major Cities Chiefs Association. “Police officers receive months of firearms training; they get instruction on decision-making and de-escalation. Even with all of that, police have been criticized that they have been too quick to use deadly force.” The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union with some 3 million members, also rejected the idea. “Bringing more guns into our schools does nothing to protect our students and educators from gun violence,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said.
In a January 2013 poll taken after the Sandy Hook Elementary School masssacre, 68 percent of NEA members opposed arming teachers and staff.
However, teachers volunteered for firearms training in some districts.
“Not everyone is opposed” to arming educators, reports NBC News. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans said allowing teachers to carry guns could have deterred the deterred the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School.