Ted Cruz at CPAC: Let Teachers Take Guns Into Classrooms

OXON HILL, Md. - Sen. Ted Cruz warned Thursday that Democrats are trying to use last week's mass shooting at a Florida high school as a pretext to confiscate guns, and he argued that teachers should be allowed to carry firearms into classrooms."It's tiresome," he told conservative activists meeting just outside the capital. "Every time you see a horrific crime, people in the media and Democratic politicians immediately leap on it to advance their agenda, and their agenda is stripping Second Amendment rights away from law abiding citizens."The Texan made his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering that helped propel his Senate and presidential bids. Apart from calling fellow Republican "clowns" at one point, and carefully lauding President Donald Trump's leadership, much of the appearance focused on the raging gun debate, with Cruz emphasizing his efforts to resist and derail legislation to ban assault-style weapons and otherwise erode gun rights, even in the emotional aftermath of massacres from Newtown, Conn., to Parkland, Fla. He acknowledged the impulse to "do something" after a bloodbath of the sort that left 17 people dead in Parkland last week, or at the church massacre last year in Sutherland Springs, Texas. But he said, confiscating guns and curbing gun rights "is profoundly unconstituational. Also it doesn't work."As for the idea of letting teachers take guns into the classroom, he said, "It makes perfect sense that if teachers want to exercise their right to keep and bear and arms that only makes schools safer. I don't think you should make teachers do that but if a teacher is comfortable and wants to be prepared to defend himself or herself, that's a good thing."The comments were well received, as was Cruz's assertion that the Obama administration's decision to cut $300 million in school safety funds may have been part of the problem in Parkland. Had those funds been in place, he said, the school might have had an armed security guard able to stop the shooter."The left's answer is always, always, always strip Second Amendment rights from law-abiding citizens," he said. "You want to see crime rates take off, disarm the law-abiding citizens."  Continue reading...