We do not expect to learn much from tragedies such as the Highlands Ranch STEM School shooting in Douglas County back in early May, but we do hope to learn something after one student is killed and eight others are injured by two students.
So we turned to the release last week of documents in the case. The first takeaway was that the younger of the two shooters, a trans student, told the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office he had been bullied for that reason and he wanted “the kids at the school to experience bad things, have to suffer from trauma like he had.”
It is hard to know how to turn this into policy that will make anyone safer, but there may be a way.
The second takeaway is that a hired school security guard detained one of the shooters in a hallway but then mistook a responding Douglas County Sheriff’s lieutenant for another active shooter and fired at the lieutenant inside the school twice. One of those shots struck a female student, one of the eight wounded.
Like much of Durango, we were caught off-guard last week when Durango School District 9-R administrators proposed that the school board allow them to arm hired school security guards. What could go wrong? It is not as though we are going to run experiments. We have to take our lessons where we can, and what we learned about the Highlands Ranch shooting makes us think 9-R should at least be looking for more public input.
Colorado Ceasefire, a state gun-control group, saw the connection right way in a press release last week – this kind of “friendly fire” perfectly illustrates some of the dangers of putting armed citizens in Colorado schools, it said.
