DENVER – While it never really went away, after the second school shooting in two weeks, the issue of school safety and guns in school is back in the political spotlight.
“I think a huge misconception is that we want to take away people’s guns and that’s not it at all,” Madison Rose with Never Again Colorado told Anne Trujillo on this weekend’s Politics Unplugged. “We want to find some kind of balance. Something within the gun reform debate that we can use and work on to help ensure the safety of our children in schools.”
FASTER Colorado is a group helping to provide gun safety training to teachers and other school staff in districts where they have been authorized to carry weapons. Laura Carno works with more employees have more than two-dozen school districts and says about 40 percent of the people who go through training are teachers, the rest are principals, superintendents and coaches.
“We do know about these folks they have significantly more than average fire arms experience, they’ve already been concealed carry holders for quite a while so they come to us with a very high skill level,” she said. “We’re teaching them that one narrow skill of stop a killer and stop the bleeding. There are five hours out of the three days that is medical training.”
“If more guns meant we were safer we would be the safest country in the world,” Marnie Kamensky said. Kamensky is with Colorado Ceasefire, a group that tried to convince Colorado lawmakers to pass a red flag law and extreme risk protection order this past session to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. “The US has 20 times the gun fatality of any other comparable developed nation and we are first in the world for gun ownership, so more guns equals more gun violence and I think if more guns are introduced into the schools who knows what can happen.”
Politics Unplugged airs Sundays at 4:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Denver7 and on KCDO-TV3 at noon.