President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would have personally run into a Parkland, Florida., school during the shooting there earlier this month, even if he were unarmed.
“I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” Trump told governors meeting at the White House to discuss school safety and other issues.
Trump also once again slammed the armed school guard who failed to stop the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School which left 17 students and teachers dead as “disgusting.”
He also criticized other deputies who failed to immediately enter the school, telling the assembled governors that the law enforcement officers “weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners.”
The president compared the skill involved in shooting guns to that required for the game of golf, where “some people can make a four-foot putt every time, and some people can’t even take the club back.”
And he said the “only way” to stop school shootings was “retribution.”
“You’re not going to stop it by being kind,” he said.
The armed sheriff’s deputy, Scot Peterson, who was on site during the mass shooting, resigned last week after being suspended without pay. He took cover outside the school rather than trying to enter the building and stop the shooter.
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The president again pledged to take take action to address school shootings.
And before Trump spoke to the group, Vice President Mike Pence said that school safety is “the Administration’s top priority.”
In the weeks since the horrific school shooting, Trump has proposed combating such incidents by training and arming some teachers with guns. Last week, he suggested that firearm-adept school staff be given “a little bit of a bonus” for carrying weapons, and promised federal funds to train them.
The White House has said Trump supports bipartisan legislation from Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., that would make the current national background check system function more effectively, though it wouldn’t expand the system’s reach.
At a White House discussion on school safety solutions with state and local officials last week, Trump proposed regulating the content children consume in video games, movies and online because, he said, the “level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts” and “bad things” are happening to their minds.
In addition, the president directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to propose regulations that would ban the use of bump stocks and similar devices “that turn legal weapons into machine guns.”