Wednesday at a Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) criticized President Donald Trump’s proposal to arm teachers.
Harris said, “Young people, these leaders, are making it very clear it’s a false choice to suggest you’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. And right now, what we need is we need to have common-sense gun safety laws in our country … I don’t know what we’re waiting for. We don’t need any more tragedies.”
She continued, “As a career prosecutor I have worked with many communities where children go to sleep each night hearing gunfire and so what we’re proposing is that those children—remember Sandy Hook? We’re talking about six- and seven-year-olds—so children are supposed to go to school and look at the front of their class at their second-grade teacher, and she’s going to be strapped with a gun. I don’t understand how that makes any sense.”
She added, “The studies that have been conducted by The National Criminal Justice Resource Center, which is funded by the United States Department of Justice, which tells us that for trained law enforcement officials, they only hit of their intended target approximately 20% of the time. So in an armed confrontation, they only hit their intended target 20% of the time. Now we are talking about giving teachers some limited training on how to use a gun. I would suggest that their numbers aren’t going to be any better than that. And when we say we miss our intended target, we are necessarily also saying there may be people that we hit that we did not intend to hit. And if we are talking about a teacher in a classroom, that could very well be the other students. So we have to, I would suggest, be a bit smarter about what we really intend to be the focus of legislation and policy.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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