Florida School Shooting: Trump Says Deputy Froze Or Was 'Coward'

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Trump on Friday called out the former Broward Sheriff's Deputy who waited outside a Florida school during the Valentine's Day attack, referring to him as a "coward" or someone who "didn't react properly under pressure." The president's remarks came as he pressed forward with apparent plans to eliminate gun-free school zones and arm certain teachers and faculty members in the nation's schools. Trump also angered some people when he implied that teachers love their students more than school security guards.

"He didn't go into the school because he didn't want to go into the school," the president said of Scot Peterson, the Broward Sheriff's deputy who abruptly retired on Thursday after being told that he was being suspended without pay for his actions at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

"He was tested and it wasn't a good result," the president said.

Broward Sheriff Scott Israel said on Thursday that Peterson, a school resource officer, stood outside Building 12 for four of the six minutes the shooter unloaded his AR-15 assault rifle and did "nothing." The sheriff said that Peterson was armed and in uniform at the time. Seventeen teenagers and faculty members were killed during the attack.

Peterson should have "went in, address the killer, kill the killer," according to Israel. Video surfaced of Peterson from a 2015 meeting of the Broward School Board in which the former officer assured school officials: "We're all here for the same goal; To protect our kids, to protect our property."

Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Friday responded to last week's tragedy with an ambitious $500 million planaimed at preventing similar incidents in the future. His plan would raise the minimum age to purchase a firearm in Florida to 21 in the case of both rifles and handguns; require that every school have at least one police officer for every 1,000 students at all times schools are open; give Florida judges the ability to take away guns from the mentally ill and require that anyone who undergoes an involuntary commitment must wait a minimum of 60 days before asking a court to restore their access to firearms.

Trump mentioned Peterson several times on Friday, first as he was departing the White House for the Conservative Political Action Conference: "When it came time to get in there and do something" Peterson "didn't have the courage or something happened," the president told reporters.

Much of the president's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference echoed themes from Thursday's speech by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre when he addressed the same group.

Trump spoke about hardening schools and asked his sympathetic audience, "Why do we protect our airports our banks and our government buildings but not our schools?"

He said that school gun-free zones put students in more danger and suggested that having a segment of the faculty carrying concealed firearms would be a deterrent to future mass shooters and specifically referred to the Stoneman Douglas shooter.

"This would be a major deterrent because these people are inherently cowards," the president said. "If this guy thought that other people would be shooting bullets back at him he wouldn't have gone to that school. He wouldn't have gone there."

Later, speaking with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the White House, the president took up the issue again.

Turbull acknowledged that his country has not had a mass shooting since the country undertook reforms in the wake of a 1996 mass shooting in Tasmania.

"When you grieve .... so do we," the prime minister said. "We send our love, our prayers and our condolences to all of the victims and their families of the shocking shooting of the school in Florida. We are mates. We stand by each other. And when we are hurt, we are hurt as well."

The Australian leader declined to weigh in on the renewed debate over gun control in the United States.

"It's a completely different context, historically legally and so forth," Turnbull said. "We certainly don't presume to provide policy or political advice on that matter here."

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

President Trump meets with families and survivors of the Florida school shooting and other mass school shootings earlier this week. White House Photo.