John Oliver tears apart Trump's 'terrible' idea to arm teachers with guns

John Oliver is speaking out against President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the government should arm teachers with guns to prevent school shootings.

On Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, the host dissected Trump’s pitch in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14.

Oliver began the discussion by airing video of Trump saying, “We need to let people know — you come into our schools, you’re going to be dead, and it’s going be fast.”

“Okay, so first thing there: ‘You’re going to be dead, and it’s going to be fast’ is already the slogan for Carl’s Jr., so you can’t use that,” said Oliver.

Then he got serious. “Trump’s support for this clearly terrible idea seemed to develop over the week. He actually focus-grouped it on Wednesday during a listening session featuring survivors of the shooting — a session, incidentally, for which his notes included a reminder to say ‘I hear you,’ which is what you might write down if you were a robot pretending to be a person pretending to be a robot pretending to be a person,” said Oliver.

He also showed Trump trying to gauge the temperature of the room at the listening session. Very few people appeared to raise their hands to show support for Trump’s idea. “That is Donald Trump in a nutshell — proposing a terrible idea in a tone-deaf way then refusing to acknowledge that he just lost the popular vote,” explained Oliver.

“There are clearly multiple issues with the idea of arming teachers, from the fact that it is not their job to the fact that there was an armed deputy in Parkland that didn’t deter or stop the shooter, but even the logistics of this plan are pretty daunting,” he said.

After sharing some stats from the National Center for Education Statistics, which found that Trump’s plan would mean arming more than 700,000 people in schools, Oliver added: “It’s no wonder that the NRA likes this solution. It involves buying hundreds of thousands of guns, and that’s their solution to everything.”

Watch the discussion in the clip above.