WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Friday cast doubt on the character of an armed deputy who failed to intervene during last week’s school shooting in Florida, saying he froze or was a “coward.”

“They’re trained, they didn’t react properly under pressure or they were a coward,” Trump said, calling out the school resource officer Scot Peterson by name.

“When it came time to get in there and do something he didn’t have the courage or something happened,” Trump said. “But he certainly did a poor job. There’s no question about that.”

The Broward County sheriff said that Peterson was present during the Valentine’s Day rampage that left 14 students and three teachers dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but did not act to stop it. Peterson resigned after being suspended without pay.

Trump has indicated he is weighing calls for a toughening of gun regulations in the wake of the Parkland shooting, unleashed by a 19-year-old former student armed with a semi-automatic rifle, but has also responded with a deeply controversial call to arm teachers.

On Thursday he doubled down on the National Rifle Association’s longstanding position that armed Americans were the first line of defence in confronting deadly attacks, saying: “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” The US Congress has long been deadlocked on the gun debate, accomplishing nothing despite a spate of mass shootings and polls showing that Americans support stricter gun laws by a two-to-one margin.

Staff return to Florida high school for first time since massacre

Staff members returned for the first time on Friday to the Florida high school where 17 students and faculty were gunned down last week in one of the deadliest school attacks in US history, inflaming the national debate about gun rights.

Teachers were welcomed back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland as part of what the school district called an “emotional and difficult recovery process.” Staff could be seen arriving at the school in their cars on Friday, passing perimeter checks guarded by police cars, according to video from Miami’s 7News.

Classes are due to resume on Wednesday. On Sunday, students and their parents are invited to come to the campus for “support services,” the Broward County Public Schools district said in a statement.

Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student at the school, has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Authorities have said that Cruz, who was expelled from Stoneman Douglas High last year for unspecified disciplinary problems, used a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle in the attack.

Many of the student survivors of the massacre have since advocated for tougher gun-control laws. They have been widely interviewed on national television and have travelled to meet politicians in Tallahassee, the state capital, and US President Donald Trump in the White House.

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2018