President Trump dedicated his very first tweets of the morning on Thursday (February 22) clarifying his position on arming teachers - in a two-part tweet that ended with him declaring that "A 'gun free' school is a magnet for bad people."
Trump received both support and condemnation after hosting a "listening session" for the families of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland mass-shooting victims in the White House's State Dining Room early in the day. On the one hand, he was widely applauded for giving the floor to a crowd that was peppered with citizens who espoused various differing views on school safety and gun laws. But on the other hand, he did reserve some time after taking in their stories and suggestions, to state his own proposals to the crisis, which did ruffle some feathers.
Among the President's solutions to massacres like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, are to strip schools of their 'gun-free zone' status, increase the number of security officers - preferably by hiring retired military vets to man school buildings, and to allow the arming of educators who would be trained on how to handle a firearm. The remarks sparked an immediate uproar from those who are anti-gun, and as Trump sees it, he was taken out of context.
"I never said 'give teachers guns' like was stated on Fake News @CNN & @NBC. What I said was to look at the possibility of giving 'concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience,'" the President tweeted just before 4 a.m. He'd go on to release another tweet, which you can read above.
