With temperatures heading back into the 90s in central Virginia, it’s hard for me to believe that school’s already back in session and summer is unofficially over for students in some school districts… though I’m guessing it’s even harder to fathom if you’re one of those students who are once again doing homework.
In the Lone Star State, more of those students are going to be protected this school year by armed school staff members. Texas has two programs that allow for armed school staff to serve as a first responder: the School Marshal and the Guardian programs. The differences in the two programs are that School Marshals undergo more training and are able to serve as “armed security officers and pseudo peace officers in the absence of law enforcement”, including the power to arrest, while Guardians are solely meant to “provide students and faculties an armed self defense option prior to the arrival of Law Enforcement in the event of an active shooter or ‘active killer’ on campus.
The Guardian program is by far the more popular of the two systems, with more than 380 independent school districts adopting the program by 2022. In comparison, the School Marshall program was in place in just 82 districts as of three years ago. As KLST in San Angelo reports, a growing number of school districts in central Texas now have their own Guardians in place as kids return to campus. Tom Green County Sheriff Nick Hanna is happy to see more schools adopting the program.
“It establishes for somebody wanting to attack that they are going to meet resistance,” Hanna said. “The fact that these schools are in the county, even if officers are nearby, our response time is going to be several minutes away. When we have Guardians, you are going to buy yourself a little bit of time, and that’s when the minutes really matter.”
That’s absolutely correct. According to researchers at Purdue University’s Homeland Security Institute, the fastest way to stop an active assailant attack on campus is to have both school resource officers who can pursue the suspect and armed school staff who can shelter in place with their students, ready to defend them if the classroom door is breached. In those districts that can’t afford to have a dedicated SRO on every campus, the Guardians are even more important, since they represent the only immediate response an active shooter would face.
“It is concealed carry,” Hanna said. “In fact, most of the time, most of the people do not know who the carriers are. It’s a very conflict-of-interest type of thing. We have trained with them on occasion. Our special response team guys will go out and train with them. The training program is about three to five days in length. They will do training at the range, and then they will do the training inside the individual schools. The teachers get the experience of how to respond inside their own schools and also a tactical understanding of how to approach someone who is a threat.”
I’m glad to see that more school districts across Texas are adopting the Guardian program, and hope there’s a day when every school district in the state has trained and vetted volunteer staffers in place who are ready and willing to serve as a first line of defense to the students in their care. Ideally, of course, we want to stop these threats before an active shooter ever pulls the trigger, but having good guys and gals with guns as a backup is a lifesaving policy that, frankly, should be adopted by schools across the country.
Editor’s Note: Tens of millions of Americans exercise their Second Amendment rights every day, and the radical left will stop at nothing to strip us of those rights.
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