For years now, the subject of gun control has been a divisive one in the USA. And, in the wake of the Parkland school shooting on February 14th, the debate on the matter has only become more heated.
"To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you! Shame on you!" said Emma Gonzales, a survivor of the attack. "Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this: We call BS!”
However, despite calls for more stringent regulations on what type of weapons should be available to the American public - and, indeed, who exactly should be permitted to use them - President Donald Trump seems resolute in his stance that guns are not the problem. In fact, he wants to see more of them.
In a tweet last week, Trump said he was looking into "the possibility of giving concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience," but many have pointed out the flaws in this.
One particularly vocal opponent to the proposition is Brandon Friedman, a former Army infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan who is an expert in combat. In an op-ed letter for NY Daily News, he explained that there were a number of flaws in Trump's plan to give teachers guns - but there was just important one that he wanted to discuss.
"Arming educators is a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons, but I want to hone in on a crucial one: the fiction that arming teachers means they’ll be able to stop an armed attacker," Friedman said.
He then went on to list several other mass shootings that have occurred in the USA over the last year and a half (and the fact there are so many should be warning enough that guns are a problem in the states), and pointed out one key detail about all of them: there was a "good guy with a gun" present at every one.
"There were armed guards at Columbine, the Pulse nightclub and in Las Vegas at the time of the massacre. At Parkland too. Time and again, armed civilians or security guards are out-maneuvered, out-gunned and too inexperienced. It’s difficult for a rational person to reach a state where they can go toe-to-toe with an armed psychopath who has nothing to lose. I was professionally trained and still almost blew it at the moment of truth.
"If armed security guards often don’t stop shootings, teachers have no chance."
Friedman went on to say that simply having a gun does not guarantee that the person will be mentally or physically capable of using it in a heated situation.
"Instructing a teacher in how to use a gun does very little. Guns aren’t magical objects that turn a person into a skilled warrior, no matter how proficient one is at marksmanship ...
"Teaching someone to handle a gun is a very different skill from teaching them how to fight. People who haven’t fought (or at least been trained to fight) often seem to miss this completely."
And it's completely true. What's to guarantee that the teacher will use the gun? Or will hit their target? Even police officers miss their shot in a crime scene shoot out. What's to stop a student taking the gun off the teacher and using it?
"Anyone who tells you that arming teachers is a solution is clueless. It’ll cost kids’ lives. Teachers need to be teaching, not training to fight. But they’re up against weapons of war. And that’s on us," Friedman says.
"Rather than arming teachers to shoot back, the more obvious solution is to prohibit the sale and ownership of weapons like the AR-15. And hopefully we will. Soon."
Right now, Trump - and everyone else who currently opposes gun control - needs to listen to the victims of shootings. America has only five per cent of the world's population, yet accounts for 31 per cent of the world's mass shooters. The issue needs to be dealt with before a dozen more innocent people are murdered by a teenager with a legally-acquired semiautomatic weapon.