Alex Wong/Getty Images(NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.) — Vice President Mike Pence said the school safety will be a top national priority in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, a day after participating in a listening session at the White House with students and families affected by mass shootings.
“As the president has said, no child, no teacher should ever be in danger in an American school,” he said, adding that the president has called on Congress to strengthen background checks and asked the Justice Department to regulate devices like bump stocks used to change rifles into machine guns.
“Later this week when the president meets with the nation’s governors in our nation’s capitol we’ll make the safety of the nation’s schools and our students our top national priority,” he said.
President Donald Trump is meeting with education officials from multiple states Thursday to discuss school safety in the wake of the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida last week.
On Wednesday he met with students and family members affected by the shooting for a listening session on solutions to prevent mass shootings.
In that meeting Trump suggested that more teachers should carry weapons in schools, indicating that if they had a gun they would be able to stop an active shooter.
“If the coach had a firearm in his locker, when he ran at this guy — that coach was very brave — saved a lot of lives, I suspect,” Trump said in the listening session, referencing Aaron Feis a teacher and coach who was killed protecting students last week. “But, if he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run. He would have shot, and that would have been the end of it. And this would only be, obviously, for people that are very adept at handling a gun. And it would be — it’s called concealed carry, where a teacher would have a concealed gun on them.”
There was an armed security guard at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but law enforcement said he did not encounter the gunman during the mass shooting, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said during a press conference on Friday.
National Rifle Association vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre echoed calls for schools to amp up security during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“I refuse to leave this stage until I say one more time that we must immediately harden our schools every day,” LaPierre said. “Every day young children are being dropped off at schools that are virtually wide-open soft targets for any one bent on mass murder.”
Trump defended the idea of arming teachers in a series of tweets on Thursday morning, saying that knowing there were armed teachers in a school could deter potential shooters.
Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, who also attended Wednesday’s listening session, said after the shooting last week that schools “have the option” to arm teachers.
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