McDonnell: Arm teachers

Twenty first-graders were among the 26 massacred at a Connecticut elementary school last week. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell suggested today that the massacre wouldn’t have happened if a teacher or school administrator had been armed.

“If people were armed, not just a police officer, but other school officials that were trained and chose to have a weapon, certainly there’d be an opportunity to stop aggressors coming into the schools,” said McDonnell, labeling heightened discussion and public support for gun-control measures in the wake of the shootings a “knee-jerk reaction.”

His comments on a Washington radio station on Tuesday about arming teachers as a solution to prevent future school massacres drew its share of reaction.

“And when that fails to stop this, what’s next? Arm the students? If teachers wanted to carry guns in order to do their day job, they would have become policemen,” Senate Democratic Leader Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, said.

“I am appalled. There are more guns in America than people, and yet we have one of the highest rates of gun violence in the world.,” Senate Democratic Caucus Chair Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, said. “The governor should know better than to suggest that arming citizens will solve anything. Maybe the governor should focus on solutions that could actually have an impact, like banning the high-capacity magazines used to inflict horrific violence upon countless American cities, from Aurora to Newton.”