WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump says arming teachers with guns, and placing armed military veterans in schools, is part of the solution for the problem of school shootings.If Aaron Feis, the assistant football coach slain last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had been carrying a gun, the rest of the massacre there would have been averted, Trump claimed Wednesday at a White House “listening session” with Douglas survivors and other victims of gun violence.Trump then argued that armed military veterans should be placed in schools.“You’d have a lot of people that’d be armed, that’d be ready, they are professionals, they may be Marines that left the Marines, left the Army, left the Air Force, and they are very adept at doing that. You’d have a lot of them and they would be spread evenly through the school,” Trump said.Trump has previously expressed similar sentiments, arguing that terror attacks in Paris and elsewhere could have been thwarted with looser gun laws. But with many Douglas students speaking out in favour of gun control in the wake of the massacre that killed 17 people, and with national outrage about that rampage increasing the political pressure on Republican gun-rights advocates, proponents of stricter laws had hoped that the listening session might persuade Trump to change his mind.He showed no evidence of any softening. And his pro-gun instincts were encouraged by many of the people in the session.None of his vocal critics from Douglas appeared to be in attendance. (One of them, David Hogg, declined the invitation.) Several of the students and parents who were present praised his approach, called for a greater presence of guns on school campuses, advocated a tightening of other security measures, or did not suggest specific changes.Trump was urged to pass gun control measures by one Douglas student, Samuel Zeif, who tearfully called for a renewed ban on assault weapons like th ...
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