A group of Colorado teachers is taking firearms training to provide an extra layer of security for school students, and already an anti-gun organization is trotting out “scare” rhetoric to argue that this is a wrong move.
According to AOL.com news, the group of 17 instructors is taking an three-day course at a Weld County gun range near Denver. The effort will enable these volunteers – all of whom have concealed carry permits – to be first responders in an emergency.
But a group calling itself Safe Campus Colorado opposes the notion with a hard-to-prove argument that having guns on campus is “detrimental to the safety of both students and teachers.”
The BBC quoted “political activist” Ken Tolz, who created the group and issued statement to KUSA Colorado’s 9 News.
“The dangers of adding guns to a school environment are dramatically increased by allowing loaded lethal weapons into a school environment on a daily basis,” he said in a statement.
And Tom Mauser of Colorado Ceasefire, who lost a son in the Columbine High School attack several years ago, contended that, “These teachers are not going to get the level of training that law enforcement or really highly trained security guards are going to have.”
This raises a question nobody seems to be asking: Are Ceasefire and Safe Campus Colorado offering to foot the bill to provide schools with “highly training security guards?” If not, and if police officers are not on or near a school campus in the event of an attack, these armed teachers just might provide a first line of defense that didn’t exist at Columbine or Sandy Hook.
While there was a school resource officer at Columbine who did exchange shots with killer Eric Harris, by that time several students had already been shot.
In the years since Columbine and Sandy Hook, a new attitude about dealing with active shooters has emerged. It can be essentially summed up in three words: Engage, fight back. Police train for such events. Over the past few years, teachers and school administrators have been doing likewise where such programs are allowed. There is no evidence that any of these programs have resulted in harm to anyone at any of the schools that are involved.
