The Vice-President of the National Rifle Association (NRA) stood in front of reporters, a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, with a controversial announcement.

“I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school – and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January,” LaPierre said.

The NRA VP’s comment was met with negative reactions from teachers and school organizations, pointing out that having armed officers on their schools would not prevent these incidents. Columbine and Virginia Tech both had armed security officers in their campuses. Virginia Tech and Columbine High School were schools in which one of the worst gun related mass murders in the United States happened.

Then the NRA President, David Keene, whistled a different tune in an interview with CNN, saying that is not the decision of congress but will be up to the schools themselves if they wanted armed police men on their premises.

“Whether an individual school wants that kind of protection or doesn’t want that kind of protection is really up to the individual school,” Keene said in the interview.

Some surprising facts were revealed during the interview, among them were that about 23,000 schools in the United States today have armed security officers roaming around their campuses.

“We’re not urging that teachers be armed, but in some schools, school districts and teachers are armed today, and if the school district and the teachers want to do it that way, it’s really up to them, it seems to me,” he said.

In Utah, gun right advocates are offering more that 200 teachers hours of training using weapons. Another group in Ohio is giving out tactical firearms training to 24 teachers. Other states and their legislators are now considering allowing teachers to carry concealed firearms.

Whether or not allowing firearms in the hands of faculty members and other school staff would be a good idea is still up for debate, but most states are already trying to find ways in preventing these types of tragedies. One columnist even went as far as saying that children and students need to be trained how to attack and disable a gunman.

Still a lot of people disagree with the move, “It’s a terrible idea,” Carol Lear, a chief lawyer for the Utah Office of Education, told the Associated Press. “It’s a horrible, terrible, no-good, rotten idea.”