Piers Morgan: Arming teachers is an ‘abomination of an idea’

British commentator Piers Morgan ripped President Trump’s proposal to arm teachers in schools, calling it a “shockingly bad abomination of an idea.”

He said in a piece published Monday in the Daily Mail that the New York Police Department (NYPD) studied officers’ accuracy rates a few years ago when firing guns. The survey, he wrote, found that accuracy rates were very high in training, but not in real-world incidents.

{mosads}”In real-life gunfights, there was a dramatic difference,” Morgan wrote.

“In 2005 for example, NYPD officers fired 472 times, hitting their target just 82 times. That’s a 17.4% hit rate. Raymond Kelly, the New York police commissioner at the time, explained this was down to ‘the adrenaline flow, the movement of the target, of the shooter, the officer, the lighting conditions.'”

Morgan said that when people are confronted by someone who is actually shooting real bullets, “pressure, fear and unpredictable circumstances can have a hugely detrimental effect on even a firearm expert’s ability to shoot back accurately.”

Morgan urged people to imagine what the accuracy rates would be like if guns were put in the hands of a teacher “in a classroom full of terrified children as a lunatic bursts into a school and blazes away with an AR-15 assault rifle.”

He predicted it would be more likely that a teacher would accidentally kill a child in that situation.

Morgan said there is only one solution to reduce the gun violence in America.

“That is the one so superbly articulated by the brave, bold students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,” he wrote.

“America needs to wake up to reality that the No1 problem with its gun violence culture is not ‘people’, it’s the ready availability of guns.”

Following the Florida school shooting, Trump proposed arming teachers, a highly controversial proposal that has been met with criticism from both sides.

Trump has argued that arming teachers would be a deterrent to school shootings.

The students who survived the shooting have become vocal advocates for gun control and have been rallying lawmakers to take action to prevent another school shooting.

Morgan interviewed Trump in late January, marking the president’s first international TV interview since he assumed office. The commentator has in the past been critical of some of Trump’s actions.