Trump Insists He Never Said to Arm Teachers and Then Immediately Says We Should Arm Teachers

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump claimed, falsely, that he’d never said he wanted to “give teachers guns” as a deterrent against future mass shooters. He then launched into a tweetstorm insisting that the only way to deter future mass shooters is to give teachers guns.

Beyond the fact that Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, did in fact have an armed security guard on site during last week’s mass shooting—and that teachers really don’t want to be armed—Trump’s reliance on “history” conveniently ignores that banning assault rifles and other weapons of war can demonstratively reduce the number of mass shootings to effectively nothing.

Or we can all just keep our fingers crossed that the 7th grade teachers ready to start “instantly shooting” are as reliable as the president hopes they are.

Trump ended his blatantly contradictory tweets by laying down a few (extremely minimal) solutions he said he’d be “strongly pushing.”

The National Rifle Association, however, has already come out against some of Trump’s proposals. So while the president’s claim that gun-toting teachers will stop future school shootings may be total bullshit, the inevitable wave of gun-toting lobbyists working to prevent any sort of meaningful action from this White House is a sure thing.

Update, 9:40 AM: Perhaps sensing his last tweet had crossed the line with his NRA funders, Trump returned to Twitter a short while later to make sure everyone knows who butters his bread.