On this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Podcast, host Julie Gunlock talks to IWF Senior Fellow Laura Carno about the Nashville school shooting and how to better ensure school safety.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to this program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and of course their kids. We have a rather serious subject to talk about today, but I wanted to get my good friend Laura Carno on. Hey, Laura.
Laura Carno:
Hi there. How are ya?
Julie Gunlock:
I’m doing well. Laura is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. She’s a political media strategist, and she is the founder and executive director of FASTER Colorado, an organization that trains armed K-12 school staff at no cost to the school. I think people can probably figure out why I wanted to have Laura on today. It’s great to see you, Laura, and I know these are tough subjects, but just to give the audience a quick overview, we had a 28-year-old woman, a former student at a Nashville Christian school. She identified as transgender, but this was a woman who identified as a man, but it was a woman, kind of rare in terms of mass shootings, but in this case it was a woman. She went into this Tennessee private school, grade school. She killed three students and three adults, including the head of the school. And then the shooter was killed by police. She had a manifesto. She was clearly struggling mentally.
And again, these victims were killed at Covenant School, which is this little elementary school. I don’t like to say shooters’ names on this, but of course we have a media fixated on, I mean, got to tell you, Laura, it’s been a really weird media narrative, because almost instantly it went to Trans Day of Vengeance and Trans Rights, which nobody’s even talking about the victims. That aside though, and let’s try to take that stuff out of the conversation. The bottom line is, a shooter got into a school. And now the police who reacted did an exquisite job, near perfect job, reacting, and we can talk about that a little bit later. But the bottom line is, and I don’t know the exact time, I can’t remember, but it was a very short time from the shooting to the reaction from the police officers. And thank goodness there weren’t more victims. But the bottom line is, no one was armed in that school.
Laura Carno:
Yeah. That we know of.
Julie Gunlock:
That we know of. Right.
Laura Carno:
Yeah. There’s some indication that one of the 911 calls, an employee said, we have some armed people, but there’s no detail out about that. They could have been one of the people who were shot. They could have not been there that day. And so, I’d like to say it that way that we know of.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, okay. And that’s smart. It seems to have gone down a lot like other school shootings where you had to wait for a police presence for there to be any, I mean, we’ll take out Uvalde, but there had to be a police presence to take down the shooter or arrest the shooter. I want to talk to you a little bit about some other options. And one of those options is arming school staff. This is something that you do, you help train school staff. Talk to me about what that means, because I think a lot of parents hear that and they go, well, not all, but some parents are genuinely curious. But there was a video this week of, I can’t remember where it was, but a city council actually approved a plan to arm teachers. And of course, Moms Demand was there and causing quite a ruckus and sort of yelling and saying, “This is terrible. We shouldn’t have guns in schools.” Tell me what arming schools does, what arming teachers actually does.
Laura Carno:
I’ll keep the language at arming school employees or arming school staff, in our seven years of doing training for these armed heroes in our schools, only about 40% of them are actually teachers. And so, I just want folks to understand that this could be coaches, and janitors, and principals, and counselors, and all kinds of folks. Let’s use Nashville as the example. It was 14 minutes between when it started and when it ended. And that includes, most of that was then the law enforcement getting to the school. The question is, and undoubtedly they saved lives because it could have been 7 or 20 adults. Their lives are valuable too. So, from the minute somebody comes in to try and harm people, how do we save that first child, that second child, that first teacher? And the only way you can do it is having well-trained armed adults in the school. So, that could be a school resource officer.
And we love our school resource officers. They do lots of things besides stop active killers and they create good relationships with children and law enforcement and that sort of thing. But the school resource officers can’t be everywhere at once. And most school districts that have school resource officers, they are shared among many campuses. And if you’re a killer, if you have these terrible things in your mind that you want to go, well, you’re not going to start your crime right in front of a uniformed armed school resource officer. And there’s lots of indication in cases of school shootings where there was an SRO that they waited until the SRO was gone or in a different building or what have you. So, we love our SROs and they can’t be everywhere at once. Also, they’re expensive. You’re paying, depending on where in the country, between 40 and $80,000 a year for these folks to be on-
Julie Gunlock:
If I can just interrupt there too? Also, SROs are often within the budget of the police department. And we know that a lot of police departments are facing cuts right now, and so often they have to make a choice. I’ve seen cases of, well, we got rid of the SROs because our police budget has been cut so much, and that’s part of this whole defund police movement that’s driven that. So, I think that’s another contributor to getting rid of SROs because they don’t have the budget. So go on, I just wanted to make …
Laura Carno:
Right. I had a call with a rural school district yesterday. SROs aren’t an option because their local sheriff’s office in this very rural area is just understaffed, they can’t do the basics. So, that’s why so many school districts across the country, not just here in Colorado where we are, so many school districts across the country have said, “We have people who work here every day who carry a firearm on their person outside of school every day.” They’re simply disarmed when they come on campus where they are arguably the most vulnerable. So, I would estimate, I mean these are very quiet policies typically, but I would estimate there are probably 5 to 10,000 employees across the country.
Julie Gunlock:
You have schools… And just so you know Laura, and it’s not that big of a deal, but there is a little bit of a break sometimes in your WiFi. I don’t know if your WiFi is going in and out, but you’re freezing a little bit on the screen. So, just FYI, I don’t know if you can do anything about that. So, there might be some awkward moments.
Laura Carno:
Okay.
Julie Gunlock:
And they’re quick, so it’s not going to impede the conversation. But I do think that people assume when you say arming teachers or arming school officials, that it’s going to turn into the Wild West and that every teacher will be packing heat. Talk to me a little bit about how armed school officials, how they’re carrying their weapon.
Laura Carno:
And it’s really important to understand that these are volunteers. They’re a hundred percent volunteers, nobody is suggesting that everybody in a school be forced to be armed. And so, it turns out to be a handful of people in each school building, where this is implemented. And everywhere that we are aware of, these school employees are carrying on their person, we refer to it as deep concealment. Nobody knows that they’re carrying a firearm. And I think parents like that too. Nobody’s talking about having, everybody open carrying-
Julie Gunlock:
A shooter or like…
Laura Carno:
Yes, that’s just not part of the discussion.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Laura Carno:
And so, they just go about their normal day. There’re teachers or janitors or we have [inaudible] come through our program, a school nurse, bus drivers. So, lots of different positions. They are simply doing their jobs. They are carrying a firearm. Nobody will know that they’re carrying a firearm unless, God forbid, one of these terrible shootings or attempted shootings happen. They are trained for one thing and that’s stopping that mass killing. They’re not doing anything else cops do.
Julie Gunlock:
Tell me a little bit about the training that you provide.
Laura Carno:
Sure. When a school gets authorized to have armed staff, and I’m going to speak in Colorado terms, it’s very similar in other states, but the school board would pass the policy. The school district goes to their insurance company and says, “Please insure us for this.” There’s usually an extra writer. And then the insurance company, sometimes state law, but usually the insurance company says, “Your training needs to have this many hours and look like this.” So, that’s the training that we provide here at FASTER, the same test as law enforcement has to pass to get out of the police academy just on their firearm skills. So, that’s the training we provide, is that annual training. School boards say, “Annual training isn’t enough. You have to go get other training.” And they might do that with local law enforcement, they might get together with other armed schools and do training together. So, we just do that annual training, but every school board is saying, you’re not training just annually. You’re training monthly and quarterly as well.
Julie Gunlock:
Okay. And then I’m interested in also, how effective… I wouldn’t say it’s totally new, but for a lot of people, they’re starting to think about this, that we have children and teachers as, and it always amazes me, you’ve got this dual conversation about how we have a mental health crisis in this country, and then the same people who are screaming about the mental health crisis in this country don’t think that maybe we should arm school officials to protect kids who essentially are sitting ducks, and teachers and school officials who are sitting ducks if a shooter gets in. So, tell me about how the results of arming schools, hardening schools, I know this is kind a part of hardening schools.
Laura Carno:
Sure.
Julie Gunlock:
Is there good data that shows that this works?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. It’s hard to talk about the things that didn’t happen if you don’t know that they didn’t happen. But in the Nashville situation, the police chief in one of his very early press conferences reported out that in the shooter’s manifesto was discussion of another school that she did not choose because it was a more hardened target. He spoke, the words that the police chief used or something along the lines of better security, enhanced security. Don’t know exactly what that was. It could have been [inaudible] already. So, we have deterrence like that.
The Crime Prevention Research Center did a very extensive study of all the school shootings, and zero of them have been in places with armed school employees. We’ll see if Nashville changes that. But Julie, here’s one of the things that is really important for people to know. We hear, “School employees don’t have the mindset to save lives.” We see in every single one of these from Sandy Hook, Columbine, up to the present ones, school employees keep running toward the sound of gunfire and putting their bodies between bullets and children to save lives. We know they have the mindset to save lives. Why are we expecting them to go run toward armed people completely unprotected, completely unarmed? But we keep saying, “That’s okay.” And it’s not okay.
Julie Gunlock:
Right. Absolutely. And it is sort of insulting. I keep talking about these contradictions that we’re hearing in the media, teachers are the best things in the world and all this praise for teachers, much of it deserved, and what they will do to protect their classrooms and their children. And yet you also have the left at the same time saying, but we shouldn’t provide them with the protection, with the personal protection that they need to take those steps to protect not only themselves as they are trying to – so, it’s galling a little bit to hear these messages coming out of the left, which it opposes this, generally opposes this. I mean, I don’t even know. Are there any Democrats? It seems like increasingly now the left tends to be in lockstep on a lot of these issues. Are you seeing any Democrats agree that, and not just in Colorado, and you can talk about Colorado, you probably know that best, but nationwide, is there any support on the left for these kinds of measures?
Laura Carno:
Generally speaking, if there are Democrats out there across the country that are supportive of this, I’m not aware of them, but I’ll also say that there’s not a lot of, at class, for example, there could be Democrats in our class, and I wouldn’t know it because you don’t talk about politics –
Julie Gunlock:
Of course.
Laura Carno:
… it’s about saving children. So, it’s really, to me it’s hard to say-
Julie Gunlock:
But I’m talking about from a policy perspective, elected officials. It seems that the left, when I first went to Capitol Hill, there were a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who supported the Second Amendment. That seems to be dwindling now, and I know that this is, I don’t even feel like this is necessarily just a Second Amendment issue, although it is, of course it is. But it’s about child safety, it is amazing to me that they seem to not be breaking, again, with the narrative of the left, which is more gun control, more gun control, it’s frustrating to me that they can’t see that this really isn’t about that. This is much more about protecting schools and protecting kids. So, I’m always curious. Now, again, we have people on the right too who don’t support these measures either.
Laura Carno:
Yes. You’re exactly right. I’ll leave it open to, there could be pro-gun Democrats and pro-gun districts that would vote for something like this in their state. We’ve certainly had in Colorado, at [inaudible] school boards, and we’ve certainly had Democrat members of school boards be okay with this in their school district. But these, support, especially very vocal support of these policies, tends to fall on just one side of the aisle.
Julie Gunlock:
You work in Colorado, you obviously train these teachers. Do you know of parents who are opposed to this? And I don’t know if you’ve given testimony or gone to school board meetings or talked to people, but how do you reassure parents that this is actually a step to keep school officials, teachers, and children safe and not sort of, “this is an invitation for more school shootings,” which is a lot of what I hear?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. And let’s be clear that none of that has ever happened in all of the thousands of incidents of school employees carrying firearms there. There’s never been a negligent discharge, an accidental anything, aside from one thing in Utah that happened were an armed school employee re-holstering after using the restroom, shot a toilet, still bad, but no human has been hurt.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Laura Carno:
And so, I take their concerns seriously, but we have to look at the fact that nothing bad has happened, but in these gun free schools where nobody is [inaudible] a killer to protect the children, in those cases, children keep dying. So, let’s look at that evidence. But the other thing is, our program, and it’s very similar to some programs around the country as well, such as in Ohio where this started, is our instructors are all active duty law enforcement instructors. So the modules, so to speak, that law enforcement learns to stop active killers, same stuff that our guys are teaching in FASTER classes to these armed school employees.
We teach at this point, at law enforcement training facilities, we’re using the same equipment, so this is a very high level of training, and they pass a similar test that law enforcement passes to get out of the academy. Ours is actually tougher, and we require, they pass at a hundred percent. The schools have vetting processes. If anybody came through our class that we had concerns with, especially our guys that [inaudible] and so forth, if we had concerns at class, we share that information back to the school. So, there’s lots of levels of making sure these are the right people with the right skills, who when the chips are down and there is no law enforcement there, they are the first responders.
Julie Gunlock:
Laura, you are always a wealth of information and very reassuring, I think, to a lot of the folks who’ll be listening to and watching this podcast. This is very helpful. Again, I always like talking to you, but it’s always such a serious topic. These are really serious issues, and I can’t thank you enough for coming on here and shedding some light on these new, I think, really important policy ideas to keep kids safe.
Laura Carno:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Julie Gunlock:
Great. It was great to hear from Laura, and I would encourage everybody to check out the work that she does on iwf.org. She also puts resources up on iwnetwork.com. That’s the Independent Women’s Network. Lots of great fact sheets, policy focuses, talking points that will help you really understand this issue better. Thank you for watching today. The Bespoke Parenting Podcast with Julie Gunlock is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. You can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help me out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube or iwf.org. Hang in there, parents, and go bespoke.
