The news following the Parkland massacre has focused primarily on efforts to impede the rights of people who had nothing at all to do with Parkland. The anti-gun left wants to inhibit the rights of law-abiding citizens in some misguided effort to stop the next shooting, which will still happen no matter what you do.

However, a small school district in Colorado is addressing the situation differently. They’re expanding gun rights in an effort to combat school shootings. And not just any expansion, but one that will directly impact these kinds of shootings.

A rural Colorado school district decided Wednesday night to allow its teachers and other school staff to carry guns on campus to protect students.

The Hanover School District 28 board voted 3-2 to allow school employees to volunteer to be armed on the job after undergoing training.

The district’s two schools serve about 270 students about 30 miles southeast of Colorado Springs, and it takes law enforcement an average of 20 minutes to get there. The district currently shares an armed school resource officer with four other school districts.

Board member Michael Lawson backed the idea not only as way to protect students from a mass shooting, but also as protection against possible violence connected with nearby marijuana grows, which he believes are connected with foreign cartels, the Gazette of Colorado Springs reported.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a unanimous decision by the board.

School board President Mark McPherson said a survey showed the community was split on the issue. While staffers would get some training, the retired Army officer said he didn’t think it would be enough to help them respond effectively to an active shooter. He worries what would happen if they fired and missed in a classroom.

“We need to leave that to the professionals,” said McPherson, who also worries about the risk posed by just having the guns in the school building and how they would be stored.

It should be noted that some states have allowed armed staff for years without incident. In other words, the problem isn’t in law-abiding teachers and staff and it has never been.

Colorado knows school violence. The name “Columbine” is still synonymous with school shootings, after all. Yet how would Columbine have unfolded if there had been even one armed teacher there? How many more students might have survived if those two snot-nosed punks had met armed resistance?

While the Hanover School District isn’t likely to be the target of a mass shooting, they’ve taken a proactive step. In fact, they’ve taken the kind of step that might very well have prevented the district from ever being the target of such a horrific event. After all, armed staff throws in a variable that a mass shooter is unlikely to want to deal with. A given school could have no guns or dozens. They just wouldn’t know, and that might push them to choose a different target.

No one wants to see these events happen, but it’s past time pretending that new laws will actually do any good. Armed resistance is what matters.