Guns in school

TEN SLEEP – During the Ten Sleep School Board meeting Monday evening, Washakie County Sheriff Steve Rakness spoke to board members and public attendees about the positives and the negatives of having school employees carry a handgun and the requirements that would need to be met.

Earlier this year the Wyoming Legislature passed Wyoming statute 21-3-132 giving the board of trustees the option to adopt rules and regulations allowing employees to possess firearms on campus.

In an earlier interview Ten Sleep School Superintendent Jimmy Phelps stated, “Sheriff [Steve] Rakness informed us several years ago that in the event of an ‘active shooter,’ it could take them up to 20 minutes to get to our campus.  It would depend upon the location of the deputies at the time of the call.” He added, “Over the past several years, our district has done a lot of work to improve the security of our buildings and individual classrooms.  At a moment’s notice, we can now lock down the building, each classroom, restrooms, and make individual hallways inaccessible to an intruder.  At the same time, all individual key fobs become inoperable, so that if an intruder took a key fob away from a person, that intruder could not use it to gain access to the building or classrooms. This new statute gives us the ability to take aggressive action against an intruder in our building, not just lock down and hide.  Sheriff Rakness and the Washakie County Sheriff’s Office do a great job, but because of our distance from law enforcement, we need the ability to take aggressive action.”

Rakness confirmed that most shootings are over in nine minutes and board member Terril Mills stated, “It’s over and done before law enforcement would ever be here and that’s a concern. Once when we talked about this subject before people said this is Wyoming and I said and as you kind of said too, this is Wyoming but it has already happened a couple of times in our schools [Cokeville—1986 and Sheridan—1993].”

A community member added that the reason most shootings were over in nine minutes was because law enforcement arrived and stopped the threat.

Pros

Rakness stated that if someone loses it and tries to get into the school to cause harm, even though the doors are locked, it would only take that person about five minutes to try to shoot out the doors to get in. Those five minutes would give a school employee, who is carrying, the time to effectively stop the situation. He added, “There was a note in the state statute about a locked box. This is my opinion, a locked box is worthless. You have to have that weapon on you at all times because if you have to go back to the box to get it, it’s too late and that’s why we are discussing this here tonight is because we are not always up here all the time and even if we are up here, we could be up the Upper Nowood, we could be down the Lower Nowood. I don’t believe that Washakie No. 1 is going to broach that subject because they have a fulltime 24-hour, seven-days-a-week police department there and they can respond at any time. Response time there is maybe a couple minutes. Here in the winter time we are talking about 25 minutes or so depending on the weather.”

The statute states that any person carrying a firearm must maintain the firearm on his person at all times or in a concealed biometric container or locked box within the direct control of the individual at all times.

He explained, “No.1 we are not always up here all the time. No.2 if we have more than one bad thing happening, our resources here in Washakie County are fairly limited. No.3 When something starts happening 25 minutes is kind of a long time to be hanging out here with shots being fired at you.”

Any and all school employees would have to be extensively trained before being allowed to carry. (See related story)

Cons

Rakness explained that concealed carry is going to be an extremely high liability situation. “I can guarantee you, if you have a shooting, you have an accidental discharge, if you have negligent retention of your firearm there are going to be lawsuits,” Rakness said. “One thing to prevent that stuff from happening is to have good policies and procedures. If you start a program here, you are going to have to keep doing it. You can’t start it and let it go. If you start it you have to keep going,” he added.

He stated that the person or persons chosen, if the board decides to adopt a concealed carry policy, would need to vetted extremely well, would need to have a psychological evaluation and would need to be prepared to fire the gun if a situation occurred. “It’s going to be hard because you are going to have to pick somebody that can bear that burden. You will have a hard time finding someone to do this kind of job because it’s going to be a 100 percent commitment. You’re going to have a firearm with you all the times and that’s a pretty big burden. Are you going to have somebody that will fit that role? How long are you going to look until you find somebody that can fit into that role,” Rakness said.

Reaction

Several school employees, community members and board members agreed that given the fact that law enforcement is so far away, to not at least look into what would be required and all the aspects involved would be irresponsible.

Many schools have a school resource officer which, according to Sheriff Rakness, would cost about $40,000 per year and the state and the schools don’t have the extra money. One community member emotionally stated that she would prefer to find a way to come up with the money needed to have a school resource officer at the school at all times instead of having an employee or employees carrying a firearm.

Several board members stated that they would like to get more input from teachers, employees and parents before any decision was made.