Donald Trump's Idea To Arm Teachers Is Dangerous For Black Students. But You Already Knew That

A man rumored to be afraid of stairs, sharks, being poisoned to the point that he often retreats to McDonald’s for food, and notoriously cited bone spurs to defer from military service, expects us to believe that if there was a mass shooting happening inside of a school, he would immediately run in to stop it —unarmed, no less. It is the latest preposterous declaration from Donald Trump, the most pedestrian president in American history, but for all the laughs and jeers that can be drawn as a result of Cadet Bone Spurs suddenly developing superhero syndrome, there is a more dangerous assertion from Trump about the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that continues to haunt many of us. And in an interview with Today on Monday, his daughter, Ivanka Trump, who currently behaves as some sort of Canal Street Hillary Clinton, says her father’s proposal to arm teachers is “not a bad idea” but “an idea that needs to be discussed.” As if there aren’t already enough reasons to loathe the political ascension of that Sunkist colored simpleton, his equally stupid grifter offspring, and the kakistocracy they’re helping establish, we’re now provided with one more. Not long after the prospect of arming teachers to thwart future school mass shootings was introduced, many promptly and thoughtfully addressed the various reasons why it is a terrible idea. One doesn’t need to be a policy wonk, military veteran, or researcher to know why such a proposal is utterly stupid. Anyone with sense is able to conclude that more guns is not the solution to the problem — particularly not arming underpaid teachers already often dealing with overcrowded classrooms and a severe lack of resources. However, if you are Black in America and all too familiar in which the ways we are treated as opposed to our white counterparts, you have a distinct fear over the sort of deadly predicament that could beset Black students. Studies have highlighted the Black students are disciplined at much higher rates than white students. Indeed, professors Derrick Darby and John L. Rury wrote in the New York Times op-ed “When Black Children Are Targeted For Punishment” last fall: According to a Department of Education report, black students nationally were three times more likely to be suspended than whites in 2012. Suspensions occur most commonly in secondary schools, but black children were more than twice as likely to be suspended from preschool as well. Harsher discipline for black students is not just a Southern or state-level problem. It is a national crisis. Other evidence indicates that black students are punitively disciplined for relatively minor infractions, such as showing disrespect to teachers, willful disobedience or talking too loudly, while white students who commit more serious infractions are punished less severely. Moreover, while metrics from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights have shown that Black boys are more likely to be suspended than any other group of students, Vice’s Nia Decaille noted that more recent studies have shown that Black girls are being suspended and disciplined in school at higher rates in every state in the country. Around this same time, a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality revealed that adults in the United States tend to view Black girls as “less innocent” and more adult than white girls. While her father has long proven what he thinks of Black youth, isn’t Ivanka Trump supposed to be the one who advocates for women and girls? Although she’s already proven her ineffectiveness to steer Trump from his worse impulses, why lend his incredibly dangerous proposal the credence it doesn’t deserve? Thankfully, no matter how much he blabbers about it, it is highly unlikely that teachers across the country will be handed guns. Yet, as much as he has been criticized for calling on teachers to be armed in lieu of another mass school shooting, not enough has been said about how diabolical it is to respond to a gun manufacturer created problem with a con to boost their profit margins i.e. arming teachers. In “The economics of arming America’s schools,” Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump explains that the government would have to put forward $1 billion to buy more than 718,000 guns for teachers and train them on how to use them. The NRA couldn’t have concocted a better scam and fool to peddle it. It was frustrating last week to watch 45 feign human emotion as he looked at crying school children —largely white— grieve about their murdered friends and classmates and pleading with him to make it more difficult for the next mass shooting to happen. But it is all the more rage inducing for his response to them being a call to populate schools with even more guns. And whether knowing it consciously or not, potentially make it even more dangerous for Black students nationwide.