Arming "at Least a Few Teachers" in Each School Would be a Good Idea Says Doyle Brunson

Doyle Brunson has tweeted in support of President Trump’s proposal about arming teachers in the wake of this month’s Parkland school shooting.

Poker legend Brunson is an 84-year-old man from Texas who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a Christian - certainly a demographic that nobody would be surprised to find out about that they’re supporting a conservative viewpoint.

Yet when he tweeted his agreement to President Trump’s suggestion that gun-trained teachers should be armed in the classrooms he faced some backlash.

Brunson’s proposed solution somewhat differs from the president’s since the Texas Dolly is clearly stating he would train and give firearms - more specifically shotguns - to every teacher, while the president was only speaking about 20% of the teachers earlier.

As of now, the aforementioned tweet has 133 likes, 15 retweets and 361 comments - the majority of which are critical of Brunson for his opinion.

The debate about gun control has been reanimated again in the United States - although some may argue it’s been constantly animated - since on February 14th a 19-year-old former student of the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida entered the school building with an AR-15 rifle and killed 17 people. 

Many people argue rifles should be banned from the public altogether, while supporters of the second amendment - the passage in the US Constitution that gives gun ownership rights to the country’s citizens - are looking for alternative solutions that could prevent these reoccurring mass shootings.

Brunson evidently falls in the latter category. He didn’t back down following the criticism he got online for wanting armed teachers in schools, he posted on Twitter once again in favor of the idea - this time, with a personal twist to it. We also get to know what profession the 10-time WSOP bracelet winner was pursuing before making a living in poker.

He later addressed the backlash he was getting in a tweet where he changed his original position of arming every educator to arming only “at least a few teachers in each school”.

Although commendably he didn’t give up his views after facing criticism online, the attacks definitely affected Brunson who lived through many tough situations at the poker table - in his next tweet on the subject, he was wondering at what point is it appropriate to block people on Twitter over disagreements and went on to describe some of the responses he got as “abuse” and “wicked”.

The next day, however, Brunson made sure to emphasize that he’s okay with disagreement and even insults to some extent on social media, and claimed that eventually the majority of the responses he got to his tweet supporting armed teachers was in favor of his stance.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time someone from the poker world was connected to a mass shooting in some way: last October Dan Bilzerian was present at the country music concert at which the audience was targeted during the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas.