Should former President Donald Trump win the nomination again this time around, it’s unlikely he’ll have former Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket. The two have had some…well, let’s call it “tension” over the last couple of years.
Instead, Pence is making his own play for the GOP nomination, formally throwing his hat in the ring on Wednesday.
He also says that he believes the answer to school shootings isn’t gun control, but armed security.
Mike Pence says he wants to see an armed guard in every public school in America to try and prevent mass shootings rather than gun control measures.
The former vice president told a CNN town hall that he believed there should be more gun-carrying security guards in American schools capable of taking down shooters.
“We ought to fund an armed and trained security guard at every public school in America and we ought to do it now,” he told host Dana Bash.
Bash pointed out that heavily-armed police had not prevented the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 students and two teachers were murdered.
“That is why I always say trained and armed …. they have got to be trained. If it takes federal funding let’s do it,” said Mr Pence.
He’s not wrong, of course, but we should also remember that the Uvalde SWAT team at least should have been trained for these situations. They still didn’t go in.
A lack of training doesn’t overcome any cowardice you might find in a department. The truth is that a lack of training wasn’t the problem in Uvalde. They were scared, which is clear based on the information provided of their concerns that the shooter had an AR-15.
After all, the guard at Parkland was properly trained and did nothing.
That said, most in law enforcement aren’t inclined to let kids be killed. We’ve seen that more than once. A prime example is Nashville. The police were on the scene quickly, entered the building almost immediately, and put the dirtbag down.
Training is important, but we also need to vet for the will to act should action be needed. All in all, though, Pence gets this one right.
However, I don’t think Pence gets it right on everything.
Mr Pence was also asked to justify his belief in expediting the death penalty for mass shooters, most of whom are killed or intend to die during the violence.
“I follow these stories as closely as you do and of course our years in the White House we saw one tragedy after another and we see evidence in the aftermath that they went in without regard to whether they would survive, but I just believe in the deterrent of the law,” he said.
I’m sorry, but if you know that many, if not most of these people have no intention of surviving the event, then why believe a threat of the death penalty would do anything?
I’m not a big fan of the death penalty anyway, mostly because I don’t trust the government to get it right 100 percent of the time, and when you’re killing people, you kind of need to have that degree of accuracy in my opinion, but the only way it deters people is if they both think they’ll get caught and are afraid of getting the death penalty.
Someone who expects to die isn’t really going to be that worried.
It would seem to me that prevention would be a much more useful strategy. Sure, it can easily be argued that deterrence is part of that, but it only works if people are deterred. I’m unconvinced.
That said, that’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. Especially if armed guards in public schools and armed teachers become the norm. I suspect the death penalty won’t exactly be needed all that much in such instances. You can’t execute the dead, after all.
