Should a kindergarten teacher carry a gun in a classroom? Should fans be allowed to bring firearms to basketball games? Or if a shooter targets a school, should teachers be armed and trained to respond?

Local legislators and school leaders want to spend some time thinking through those questions over the coming year.

“If there’s an interest in talking about weapons in schools, we ought to have a year with meetings about it where people can come talk,” said Kevin Mitchell, superintendent of Park County School District No. 1 in Powell.

During a meeting Wednesday at the Cody library, state lawmakers and school officials from Powell, Cody and Meeteetse agreed that an interim legislative committee should further explore whether to allow guns in Wyoming schools.

Viewpoints were mixed on whether a law should only allow school employees to carry a gun, or if campuses should be open to anyone with a concealed firearm permit.

Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Meeteetse Schools Superintendent Jay Curtis has advocated for allowing local school districts to decide whether employees should carry firearms.

“I want guns in my school. I do — I would do that tomorrow if we had the ability to arm some of our staff,” Curtis said. “But I don’t think the answer is to just let anyone carry a gun on a school campus.”

For rural schools like Meeteetse, it may take up to 45 minutes for law enforcement officers to arrive, he said.

“I think that everyone recognizes that it is a more dangerous world today than it was a decade ago,” Curtis said. “And the last thing that we want is our teachers to be in the position where all they have at their disposal is, ‘Please don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot my kids.’”

He said Meeteetse has implemented some creative safety measures for school security.

Meanwhile, Cody school board member Scott Weber said the country has changed over the past year, and guns should be allowed in Wyoming’s public schools.

“I’m very much an advocate of getting rid of gun-free districts,” said Weber. “It is proven by history absolutely that that’s where these walking psychotics go to get a large body count, and then it’s suicide by police or suicide by themselves.”

Other school officials and lawmakers agreed something needs to be done, especially for rural schools — but said more discussion and research is needed.

“It’s a subject that we ought to spend some time on,” said Rep. David Northrup, R-Powell. He plans to take the issue to legislative leaders and ask for an interim committee to work on it.

Last year, a controversial bill proposed to allow concealed-firearm permit holders to bring guns into Wyoming’s public schools and other government buildings.

State Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody, amended the bill in committee to say it would leave decisions about allowing guns up to each individual school district or other local governing body. That amendment upset gun rights advocates who supported the original bill; it later died in the full Wyoming Senate.

Coe says the bill wasn’t going to pass in its original form.

Mitchell said civil and professional discussion is needed with the public, rather than just conversations over social media or email. He also said legislation should be crafted in advance, with public input, rather than during the session.

“Because then it’s a mess,” Mitchell said.

Coe said it’s going to take dialogue and public meetings where people can testify.

“This is a big deal,” said Coe, who co-chairs the Legislature’s education committee with Northrup.

Legislators said Wednesday they don’t know of any gun bills going into the February budget session.

“With the budget situation, I don’t suspect that it’d get a lot of traction necessarily, but who knows?” said Rep. Sam Krone, R-Cody. “It may make sense that the very next step would be to get it on an interim committee and move forward.”

Controversy led up to meeting

led up to meeting

School leaders meet with local lawmakers each year before the Legislature convenes in Cheyenne. It’s open to the public, but it typically isn’t well-publicized or well-attended by the public.

However, last week’s discussion drew about 30 members of the public and sparked an outcry on social media after it was billed as being part of a “secret gun scheme.”

In a mass email, Wyoming Gun Owners Executive Director Anthony Bouchard wrote, “Park County’s anti-gun school superintendent Ray Schulte is working hard to ensure law abiding Citizens like YOU are NEVER allowed to exercise the God-given right to self defense.”

That email was further disseminated by the group Wyoming Freedom in Education and inspired numerous Facebook posts.

“If you follow social media, it all blew up over the past few days — that I had a proposal or superintendents had a proposal,” Schulte said Wednesday. “We don’t have a proposal. We don’t have a bill, by the way.”

Schulte, Cody’s school superintendent, said school leaders want to look at security and how to make schools safer.

Cody school board Chairman Jake Fulkerson said school leaders decided to talk about guns on campuses to fill the agenda — which also included accountability in education and “recalibration,” a review of Wyoming’s school funding model.

“This is a public forum with legislators and gun control was added at the ninth hour to try to fill the meeting up — that’s what really happened,” said Fulkerson. “And look what good came of it. I really think we made some headway, so I appreciate that.”

Mixed views

Cody school board member Ed Seymour said there are two different issues: allowing members of the public to carry guns on campuses or having school employees carry guns for school safety and security.

While Meeteetse Superintendent Curtis supports training school employees to carry firearms, he said clear policies must be in place.

“If a school district doesn’t have some semblance of control over that, you might have collateral damage that you don’t want,” Curtis said.

He also is concerned about members of the public carrying guns in situations where tensions run high, such as a high school basketball game.

Cody school board member Weber, who sells firearms through online auctions and Gunrunner Firearms and Pawn in Cody, countered that concealed-firearm permit holders undergo training.

“There’s a calmness you have when you carry a gun,” he said. “It’s quite the opposite — you don’t get into situations where things might escalate. It’s quite the opposite. You get out of it, or you’re very calm.”

Weber opposes allowing only certain people to carry guns on campuses, saying constitutional rights would be abridged.

“It would be like saying, ‘Only 30 people in Park 6 (the Cody school district) are allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights — only 30 people can write letters to the editor or go to these meetings,’” Weber said. “It would be very akin to that.”

Superintendent Mitchell, who has a background in law enforcement, asked why gun advocates are focused on only getting rid of some gun-free zones.

“Why aren’t you going after courtrooms?” he asked. “When the bill comes up, I always wonder why it doesn’t eliminate all exceptions. Why is it just schools?”

He said attorneys don’t want people carrying guns in courtrooms.

“But I don’t want them in a classroom with my kindergarten kid either,” he said. “Why are you cherry-picking on exceptions to the Constitution?”