Some of the loudest voices opposing President Donald Trump’s proposal to arm “highly trained” teachers to protect students belong to the group that knows best what it’s like to confront someone with a gun: military combat veterans.

In the week since 17 people were killed by a shooter at a Florida high school, combat veterans already had become increasingly vocal in opposition to the availability of assault weapons to civilians, writing op-eds, viral blog posts, and Twitter threads.

But the proposal to train and arm teachers, which was first floated by conservative commentators on Fox News and pushed on Thursday by the president and officials of the National Rifle Association, put many of them over the edge.

“There is a gulf between being taught how to handle a weapon, and learning to fight. Those are two distinct things,” Brandon Friedman, a former Army captain who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and later served in the Obama administration, told BuzzFeed News. “And learning how to fight, how to stand your ground when an aggressor is trying to kill you, that’s not something that comes naturally to people.”

Learning how to fight takes training — military training.

“So in order to teach, now you have to be a soldier? That’s insane,” he said.

Many veterans are chafing at hearing such proposals from people like NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre who have never served in combat, he said.

“They have this Hollywood view of what a gunfight is like,” Friedman said. “Veterans know first hand (that) until you’ve been shot at, and seen how people react in these situations, you can’t wrap your mind around it.”

Underscoring that point was the news that a trained and armed Broward County sheriff's deputy stood by outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School made no effort to confront the gunman as most of the killing unfolded.

While arming teachers may sound like a good idea, “it increases the chance of kids dying in crossfire, adds to confusion with SWAT teams trying to identify an armed assailant, and greatly increases odds of an accidental shooting” tweeted VoteVets, a progressive veterans group.



When Anastasia Bernoulli, a US Army veteran, shared a hastily-written blog post – provocatively titled “Fuck you, I like guns” – from the perspective of someone who was trained to use assault rifles, her posts had never been read by more than 10 people, she told BuzzFeed News.

It went viral, shared thousands of times and receiving more than 4,000 comments, some from “veterans as far back as Vietnam writing in support of my views,” she said.

Bernoulli says that as the most trained population when it comes to weapons, military veterans have a responsibility to speak out when something like arming teachers is proposed.

“The bottom line is that it's a tactical disaster,” she told BuzzFeed News, pointing out that it has nothing to do with a teacher's ability — her mother is a teacher.

“Learning to engage an enemy combatant is not the same as being able to hit a paper target at the end of a range," she said. "Vets know these weapons. We don't mess up on their specs. We can call BS when the gun lobby says that they're no more dangerous than someone's deer rifle. We are the people who need to be doing that.”