Colorado is trying to confront the reality that no community is immune from the threat of a school shooting. But again, they’re going about it the wrong way.
A recent report from Colorado news station KOAA highlighted a training program in La Junta where rural law enforcement officers and school resource officers participated in active shooter response exercises conducted by FASTER Colorado. The nonprofit received a $117,000 grant through Colorado’s Enhanced School Safety Incident Response program, allowing it to provide free training sessions to officers in rural communities across the state.
On the surface, it is hard to argue against more training. Nobody wants police officers and SROs to be unprepared if the worst happens. If any state in America understands the horror of school shootings, it is Colorado. From Columbine to Evergreen High, Colorado is the ground zero of the modern school shooting era. The scars left by those events continue to shape conversations about school safety not only within the state but across the country.
What the KOAA story did not spend much time discussing is exactly who FASTER Colorado is and what the organization ultimately advocates for. According to its own website, FASTER Colorado was founded in 2016 and originally operated under the umbrella of the Independence Institute, a ‘free-market’ think tank. That smells like Libertarians to me. I tend to refer to Libertarians as the party of weed, guns, and child brides. Also, the line between a libertarian and a sovereign citizen is a very fine line, but I digress.
The organization exists to support armed teachers, administrators, and school staff by providing firearms and emergency response training. FASTER openly promotes the idea that armed school employees can serve as the first line of defense during a school shooting and argues that school faculty can save lives before police arrive.
The training highlighted in the news report was aimed at police, but it is difficult to separate that effort from the organization’s broader goal of placing more guns inside schools. Reading through FASTER Colorado’s website, their message seems pretty clear. The organization believes the answer to school shootings is more armed people on campus.
Even when I was a registered Republican, conservative, and supporter of the Second Amendment, I thought arming teachers was the dumbest idea ever.
For years, Americans have been told that every new tragedy can be solved by putting another gun somewhere. More armed guards, more armed teachers, and more armed staff. They say we should put more guns in places where children are supposed to learn. Yet school shootings continue to happen.
Supporters of armed teachers often imagine a scenario where a heroic educator immediately stops an attacker and saves lives. However, school shootings are chaotic and terrifying events that unfold in seconds. A teacher who is carrying a firearm may have only moments to make life-or-death decisions while students are running and screaming around them.
Even if that teacher has received extensive training, a gunfight inside a crowded school creates enormous risks. Bullets miss, and people panic while crossfire becomes a possibility. Instead of reducing casualties, a shootout between an attacker and an armed staff member could end up injuring or killing additional students. And the problems don’t stop there.
When police arrive at an active shooting scene, they are looking for someone with a gun. Imagine the confusion when multiple people are armed and moving through hallways. An officer responding to reports of a school shooting may encounter a teacher carrying a firearm and have only a split second to decide whether that person is a defender or the attacker. That kind of uncertainty can have deadly consequences.
And my main concern is that every gun brought into a school is another gun that exists right next to students. Schools are not perfect environments. Mistakes happen, and security failures occur. Kids gain access to things they shouldn’t. The idea that introducing more weapons into schools somehow makes them safer requires a level of confidence that reality doesn’t support.
What makes this even harder to understand is that Colorado knows better than most what happens when guns end up in the wrong hands. You would think a state with such a painful history of school shootings would be looking for ways to reduce the presence of guns around students rather than expanding it.
The specter of Uvalde also hangs over discussions like this. The school shooting at Robb Elementary School demonstrated that training alone is not a magic solution. Those officers were not untrained rookies. They were law enforcement professionals who had received active shooter training. Yet as children and teachers were being murdered inside classrooms, dozens of officers remained outside for more than an hour.
That failure was not caused by a lack of guns or a shortage of armed personnel.
Then there’s the question about Colorado’s grant funding. The $117,000 awarded to FASTER Colorado comes from a school safety program, and supporters will argue that this is the type of initiative the money should support. I can’t help but wonder whether those funds could be better invested elsewhere. You know, for like education and stuff.
Schools across the country struggle with shortages of teachers, counselors, and other support staff. Early intervention programs often go underfunded. Mental health services remain hard for many families to access. Resources that help identify troubled students before they reach a crisis point receive far less attention than arming teachers.
The problem has never been that there aren’t enough armed adults around children. The problem is that guns continue to find their way into the hands of children and young people who are all too willing to use them.
Until that issue is addressed, we will keep having the same conversation after every tragedy, adding more guns, more training, and more security measures while wondering why the shootings never seem to stop.
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