No sane person wants to see another school massacre like Virginia Tech, Columbine, or Sandy Hook. So why is it that anti-gun radicals on the political left are fighting so hard against those measures proven to reduce the number of fatalities when school shootings do occur? In school districts around the country, even-keeled, data-driven administrators are heeding the advice of law enforcement and counter-terrorism experts who have explained time and again that the way to stop school shooters with the lowest amount of casualties is the combination of armed law enforcement officers assigned to schools (known as school resource officers, or SROs), and a number of school faculty and staff carrying concealed weapons. In scenarios tested, there was a control group (no SROs on campus, not concealed carriers on staff), scenarios with SROs but no concealed carriers on campus, and scenarios with SROs on campus and a very conservative use of armed faculty/staff, who sheltered in place to protect the students in their classroom only. Educator and writer John Richardson noted the results of this scenario testing:

The control scenario was just a school with locked doors and no resource officers or staff with concealed carry permits. The researchers found that the control scenario had the most casualties and the longest response time. Their model showed that the response time would be 10-12 minutes and an average of 20 casualties. Their model used historical active shooter data to arrive at this. When a school resource officer is introduced to the scenario, response times dropped to a quarter of the original times and casualties were reduced by two-thirds. The scenario involving concealed carry in the school had rather conservative parameters. Only 5-10% of the staff and  administration carried concealed and those holders sheltered in place with their students. They only engaged the threat when the shooter came into the room in which they were sheltered. In other words, they were not roaming the school actively searching out the shooter. The Homeland Security Institute found that adding concealed carry holders to the mix reduced both response times and casualties the most of any scenario tested.

At least some of the results of the scenario testing seems supported by recent real-life events. The Arapahoe High School shooter in Centennial, Colorado, was armed with a shotgun, a bandoleer of shells, Molotov cocktails (incendiary bombs),  a machete, and an extensive target list. His planned mass killing was cut short by the arrival of Arapaho High School’s School Resources Officer, a sheriff’s deputy, who closed with the shooter and trapped him in the library within 80 seconds. The murderous young Marxist managed to only kill one student before taking his own life.

Just this month a student armed with a stolen rifle attacked Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon, armed for a mass attack with a full-load-out of ammunition. He killed a fellow student who stumbled upon him in the school locker room and fired a shot that grazed a teacher in the hallway outside. Two armed SROs in the school converged on the shooter within a minute, forcing him into a school bathroom, where he committed suicide.

In both of these incidents, armed SROs stopped the attackers (in 80 seconds and under a minute, respectively)  before the murderers could carry out their plots to kill dozens of students, faculty and staff. While SROs are a valuable and indeed the primary line of defense once a school shooting is initiated, they are also a known quantity to school attackers, and as a result, they have become primary targets for school shooting plotters.

Because of this, a secondary layer of covert armed protection, in the form of specially trained faculty and staff members, is needed.

In Missouri, classes have recently begun to train these faculty and staff members with a grueling 40-hour course, with 35 hours of the course being range time under stressful conditions, as this video (below) about the training clearly shows.

That’s both far more trigger time than most law enforcement officers receive (NYPD officers allegedly receive as little as 3-5 hours of range time before being put on the street) before picking up their badges, and it is also far more specialized to the specifics of school environment. As the article notes, not all those who volunteered to attend the class will pass the course, which featured a rougher course of fire than most law enforcement “square range” training, and which sandwiches targets (active shooters) between no-shoots (innocents). Quite frankly, it appears to be a level of training that few law enforcement officers will obtain outside of SWAT/ERT or dedicated active-shooter training.

Despite the opinions of federal law enforcement and counter-terrorism experts, the scenarios proven by the Homeland Security Institute, and the high level of training these educators are undergoing, there are some individuals who refuse to discuss the issue in a rational manner.

Sadly, this includes many educators and administrators who are emotionally unable to think rationally about the issue due to their own biases and shortcomings (including G.A. Buie, principal of Eudora High School in Kansas and president-elect of the National Association of Secondary School Principals), and many reflexively anti-gun “progressives.”

You need look no further than the comments section of the Huffington Post to find reflexive, emotionally immature responses on the subject.

You don’t have to be a completely irrational ideologue to be against giving our children better school security… but it certainly helps.