During Thursday morning's MSNBC Live, host Hallie Jackson and her panel engaged in a discussion about a New York Times report describing Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s plans to allow schools to use Federal funds to buy guns for their teachers and it included quite a head-scratcher as the headline indicates.

After playing a clip of President Trump advocating that “we have to harden our schools” shortly after the Parkland, Florida school shooting, Jackson opened by proclaiming that DeVos’s new policy proposal “would be a major change away from the government’s longstanding policy not to set up schools with weapons.” She then read aloud a tweet from former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords strongly condemning the policy, arguing that it “recklessly puts American children in even more danger.”

Jackson introduced panelists Erica Green of The New York Times, Politico’s Anna Palmer, and PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor. Jackson asked Green, who wrote the New York Times article outlining DeVos’s new policy proposal, whether or not the proposal was hypothetical. Green responded:

It’s very real. I mean, the law allows for it and that, you know, the federal education law, particularly this grant and this pot of money, has no restrictions on purchasing firearms. Whereas in other grants that allow for school safety measures, there are express prohibitions on purchasing firearms and weapons. So that’s exactly why the Department is considering whether or not it’s legal, whether or not it’s in its purview.

Jackson proceeded to paint a dystopian view of America under Devos’s Department of Education, complaining that she had lifted regulatory scrutiny of “predatory” for-profit colleges. In addition, Jackson expressed furhter concern:

She’s begun dismissing civil rights cases in the name of efficiency. She’s proposing rules that would cut student loan relief by an estimated $13 billion and Axios claims that the Education Department is ignoring mistreatment of transgender students.

Jackson asked the panel “where is our federal education system going under Secretary DeVos and the Trump administration?”

After giving a non-answer to Jackson’s question, instead electing to recite the left-wing talking point describing DeVos as “someone who was very controversial when she was coming in,” Alcindor went off the deep end:

Some advocates are very worried about the racial impacts that this will have. You look at Erica’s reporting, if you start arming teachers, and you look at the statistics and see that there are black and brown students...who are being disciplined more than their white counterparts, you can then start seeing statistics where potentially black students are getting shot or in accidents when teachers are trying to shoot or trying to do gun safety measures.

Alcindor added that “there’s this idea that the NAACP and other advocacy groups say not only are we looking at this as an issue issue but it’s also an idea that racially it’s going to be a problem.”





Based on the hysterical coverage of the MSNBC panel, one could easily conclude that Devos’s new policy proposal forces all teachers to carry weapons in the classroom. In reality, the new proposal would simply give states the option to use federal money to buy guns for teachers with the appropriate training and expertise in firearm use. Not surprisingly, for liberals and their media allies, they see gun control as the only way to stop school shootings and thus reacted as such to this proposal.

A transcript of the relevant portion of MSNBC Live With Hallie Jackson is below. Click “expand” to read more.