Trump on Florida Shooting: ‘I’d Run in There Even If I Didn’t Have a Weapon’
President Trump criticized the armed sheriff’s deputy who failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during a mass shooting there on Feb. 14.
Photo by Tom Brenner/The New York Times.
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WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Monday that the country needs to take a look at whether more mental health institutions need to be opened to treat people with mental illness and avert mass shootings.
The president also said he would have run into the South Florida high school where 17 students and faculty members were killed in a mass shooting, even if he was not armed, and he criticized law enforcement officials who were at the scene of the school shooting but did nothing to try to stop it. He called their performances “frankly disgusting.”
“You don’t know until you test it, but I think, I really believe I would have run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” the president said.
Mr. Trump’s public remarks came during a meeting with the nation’s governors, in part to discuss school safety after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
“We’re going to have to start talking about mental institutions,” Mr. Trump said, adding that there was a time when it was easier to have people who acted like a “boiler ready to explode” committed to mental institutions.
The recent shooting has reopened the contentious debate on gun safety and Second Amendment protections. Mr. Trump has proposed arming school staff who receive special training, improving background checks for gun purchases and raising the minimum age from 18 to 21 to buy assault rifles. On Monday, he said the closure of many of the mental institutions across the country needed to be revisited and that the institutions could potentially treat more people with mental illness.
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