He is absolutely right: The only way to end the scourge of school shootings is to arm teachers to the teeth.

I know I’ve been hard on President Trump in the past, but, with his latest initiative on school shootings, he has completely won me over.

As the Wicked Witch of the West once observed about a meddlesome young person, these things must be done delicately.

Kids, especially adolescents, are often in a period of great anxiety and self-consciousness in middle and high school, what with hormones and iPhones and homophones all jumbled in their heads.


So, taking that into consideration, I think it’s important to empower students. As such, they should be allowed to pick out their own weapons. If a kid feels like he or she needs an AR-15, like the one that was used to slaughter 17 kids and teachers in Florida last week, hell, give ’em an AR-15.

And what’s all this wussy talk about outlawing bump stocks, like the one that guy in Las Vegas used to convert his semiautomatic rifle to a machine gun, the better to mow down defenseless people at a country and western music show?

If we’re going to really make America great again, our kids need the ability to convert their semiautomatics into fully automatics. Anybody who is against that probably kneels during our national anthem or burns the flag or voted for that commie Bernie Sanders.

Personally, I would steer both middle school and high school kids toward the Uzi. It is compact, easy to use, and is highly lethal in confined areas, such as a classroom or a school corridor or cafeteria. Granted, its accuracy diminishes with distance. But, frankly, I think the kids need the ability to spray shots rather than take the time to aim and hit the target.


And if there is some collateral damage — say they shoot the gym teacher or a janitor or maybe the nice old lady who volunteers at the library — what can I say? As our esteemed president told the grieving widow of a soldier killed in action, they knew what they were signing up for.

Now, when we’re talking about elementary school kids and even kindergartners, there is legitimate concern about arming them. Frankly, a child like that is too small to carry an assault rifle. And a “Dirty Harry”-style .44 Magnum is just out of the question. Those Magnums are cannons and very heavy. You put one of those in a small child’s book bag, and there is a serious risk that it might cause health problems because the weight could throw off a kid’s gait, or even contribute to curvature of the spine.

So, being the rational, reasonable guy that I am, I have come up with a compromise: the two-shot Derringer. It’s small, compact, easy to use, capable of being stored in a child’s lunch box.

For the bigger kids, still not tall enough to sling an assault rifle over their shoulder, I would recommend a shoulder holster, which is considerably more utilitarian than the old-fashioned hip holster. You can even get one with slots to hold pencils or pens.

But seriously, in this day and age, with iPads and laptops and what have you, how many students really use pencils and pens anymore?


Now, back to arming teachers. Apparently there is some reluctance among these high-falutin’ edumacators, who think they’re real smart but are disloyal to the president. I’m told most teachers in the United States did not vote for Donald Trump. And that’s because they are card-carrying communists! Most of them belong to unions and believe all those pinko lies that unions have created better working conditions and better wages and benefits for ordinary Americans.

Apparently most teachers believe the commie propaganda that the wage gap and wage inequality have grown worse in recent years, and that there is something wrong with the fact that some CEOs make on average 300 times more than their lowest-paid employee.

They are anti-capitalists! So it’s no surprise that these Chablis-sippin’, French cheese-eatin’ liberals would be so disrespectful and hostile to the man who wants to make America great again by arming America to the teeth again.

One of ’em, some lady named Courtney Sheppeck, who is the principal of the K-8 Murphy School in Boston’s Dorchester section, even had the temerity to criticize our commander in chief and suggest his idea of arming teachers was wrong and misguided and even a little crazy.

Can you imagine the nerve of this person, an average American educator who presides over one of the most innovative and progressive schools in the city, thinking she has the right to be critical of the president of these here United States of America?


She even uses Twitter. But then she has never given the president any credit for his inventing Twitter and popularizing its use. Typical. I think we all know that our Ms. Sheppeck has an agenda!

Ms. Sheppeck even has the audacity to question the president’s reasoning. The president tweeted that, “if a potential ‘sicko shooter’ knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there . . . problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work.”

Ms. Sheppeck, who had the luxury of tweeting because her commie union secured a vacation week every February, tweeted:

“I can’t even believe we are even talking about arming teachers! We do enough! Now we’re cops?!!#insane”

No, ma’am. You’re not cops. If you were, you’d make more money and have a better contract. And you’re so ideologically blind that you don’t realize one of the fringe benefits of arming all teachers: You would be a far more formidable force at the collective bargaining table if you show up to negotiations packing heat.

I could tell by the incredulous tone of Ms. Sheppeck’s response, and the incredulous and outraged response of other teachers and educators across the country, that they believe the president’s logic is flawed, because if someone is mentally ill and goes into a school to kill as many people as they can, they won’t be deterred by the prospect of being shot by a teacher. In fact, they probably expect to die.


This is typical of teachers and elites like Ms. Sheppeck. They have no time for cowboy rhetoric and insist that policies be based on sound logic and practice.

That’s exactly what’s wrong with this country! Never trust the elites and the so-called edumacated. Whenever we have a problem, we can’t be distracted by reality. We, like our president, need to focus on what sounds the most simple. These teachers just need to get with the program. And as our president said, and he should know, we must be offensive.

Sorry, Courtney, but the times, they are a changin’. We’re living in an age of terrorism. The rules of engagement have changed, and thanks to our president, our dear leader, there’s a new ethos in America: If you see something, shoot something.

And if you can’t handle a terrorist or a mentally ill person by packing heat, well, then you have no business being in the education business, missy.

Alls I’ll say is, who are you gonna trust on this issue? Donald Trump, who has never been a teacher or a principal or had anyone invade his workplace with a weapon of mass destruction they can buy in a couple of minutes at Walmart; or Courtney Sheppeck and all these hundreds of thousands of bleeding-heart teachers who go to work everyday armed only with a strong sense of service and concern for the kids in their schools whom they love and would absolutely die for.

Well, I know where I stand. And it’s not with some surrender monkey teachers who would take a bullet for their students but are afraid to fire bullets in their schools, even if they might hit a few kids in geometry class when they mistake a janitor carrying a mop for an active shooter carrying a rifle.

Sorry, Courtney. We don’t need teachers who read and lead anymore. We need teachers who lock and load.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.