‘Superhuman Courage’: MSNBC Host Suggests It’s Unreasonable To Expect Cops To Run Towards Gunfire
Harold Hutchison on April 3, 2023
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell claimed Monday it was not realistic to expect police officers to intervene against active shooters without “superhuman courage.”
“The Republican policy at this point, is to say, our defense of kids in school is the hope that the very first officers who get the call about the mass murder in a school will be as heroic as the two who we just saw run into that school without shields,” O’Donnell told “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “They didn’t wait for those shields that the guys in Texas waited for.”
WATCH:
Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old who identified as transgender, killed three children and three adults at Covenant School in Nashville March 27 before being engaged and fatally wounded by law enforcement. Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee announced their intention to introduce the SAFE School Act, which would provide $900 million for the purposes of training and hiring veterans and retired law enforcement officers and hiring off-duty law enforcement officers to serve as armed security at schools, in a Thursday release.
O’Donnell referenced the May 2022 mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School before Border Patrol agents stormed the classroom and fatally shot the shooter.
“The Republican policy in effect is we’re going to try to get the cops there as fast as possible so that they can keep the body count down as low as possible if the police officers have the superhuman courage to run straight to the sound of the gunfire, which we know not all police officers do,” O’Donnell said. “And so… it is just beyond horrifying, that that’s where we’ve left it.”
“Faced with this gun epidemic, you actually have the governor of Tennessee claiming he wants to protect schools, but this is the same governor that signed laws that allowed permitless carry and open carry,” Scarborough said. “So if somebody were carrying an AR-15, walking up to that school, well, nobody could really stop them.”
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