2A/EDUCATION/GUNS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The White House on Sunday [3-11-18] announced a plan to reduce gun violence at schools that includes spending federal money on training school staffers to carry concealed weapons, but not President Donald Trump’s earlier call to raise the age limit for buying guns. Instead, the plan creates a federal panel to study age restrictions and other potential changes in laws and to make recommendations later.
The White House blueprint, which comes in the wake of last month’s mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school, calls for ‘hardening our schools’ by instituting security procedures comparable to those in airports, sports stadiums and government buildings. One way to do that, the White House said, is to use Justice Department grants to train school personnel to carry weapons ‘on a voluntary basis.’… The Trump administration plan also calls on states to adopt laws allowing police, with court approval, to remove firearms from people who are a threat to themselves or others and to temporarily prevent those people from purchasing new guns. The plan also seeks improvements to mental-health systems to help identify and treat individuals who may be a threat. Those changes include increased integration of mental health, primary health care and family services.
The plan calls for improvements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation tip line, which was faulted for failing to act on warnings ahead of the Parkland shooting… Ms. DeVos will chair the new Federal Commission on School Safety, which would study issues such as increasing the age to buy some guns to 21, the effect of violence in videogames and movies on children, and identifying the best violence-prevention strategies.
The creation of the commission comes a day after Mr. Trump, during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, ridiculed similar panels that ‘meet and they have a meal and they talk.’… There is no deadline set for Ms. DeVos’s panel to present its findings, White House officials said.”
-Michael C. Bender, “White House Unveils Proposals to Reduce Gun Violence at Schools,” The Wall Street Journal online, Mar. 12, 2018 06:24am