Bill Tallen

I’ve been fighting for school security in Wyoming for eight years, but not in the front ranks; those are the approved, anonymous school employees who voluntarily carry concealed weapons in the schools with the approval of their local school board, and the uniformed school resource officers who are also present in a few of our schools. I supported the bill that was signed into law in 2017 (Wyoming Statute 21-3-132), authorizing armed staff where school districts enacted a local policy. I contributed to the WDE guidance for school districts, and to the development of Policy CKA in Cody, in 2018. Full disclosure: I bid for and won a training contract from Cody’s PCSD6 in late 2018 and have been their trainer since; I’ve been training Evanston armed staff since 2019, and Lander’s since they enacted their policy in 2022. Two of these three districts have active, growing programs. Their initial and annual or semi-annual refresher training is standards-based, stressful and comprehensive.

What prepared and qualified me for this role? From 1989 through 2009, I was a federal agent (and supervisor, trainer, and manager) in the National Nuclear Security Administration; after retiring, I worked as a contractor though 2019 for the same outfit. Our job was to conduct secure transportation of nuclear weapons and materials by road and air throughout the U.S. We had badges and guns (lots of guns), and trained longer and harder than most U.S. law enforcement agencies. Reasonably so, considering the precious cargo in our custody. Our children are no less precious.

When my family moved to the Cody area in 2012, our daughter was in first grade. Among our many concerns about her education was the lack of meaningful security against the threat of school shooters. My background in threat assessment, risk management, intelligence, and armed security against high-consequence threats led me to conclude that the best solution, which was already in place in other states, was to allow school employees who volunteer, pass rigorous vetting, screening, selection and training to carry concealed weapons on school property for the sole purpose of protecting innocent lives when all attempts at deterrence and prevention fail. 

Anti-bullying policies, detection and reporting of threats, intervention and counseling, access control, shatterproof windows, sturdy doors and locks — these all help and we’ll never know how many potential attackers are deterred or discouraged by them. But every mass shooting that does happen in a school is preceded by the failure of all those measures.

Armed defenders can stop a shooter when everything else has failed — but unfortunately, law enforcement response is seldom quick enough to save lives in the first few critical minutes. The history of school mass shootings shows that on average there are 8-14 victims shot in the first minute, and one more every 10 seconds until the shooter stops on his own, or someone intervenes and stops him, almost always with a gun. Only the presence of armed defenders already on scene when such an incident begins can save lives in those first deadly minutes before police arrive, find the shooter, and intervene. We’ve seen it again and again across America.

Since it was first authorized in law in 2017, five Wyoming school districts have implemented policies to do this. At least two more are currently moving to join them. The rest appear to suffer from normalcy bias — the tendency to believe that if a thing has not happened here in the past, it never will. That’s what grieving parents and trauma-stricken survivors elsewhere have said — that it could never happen there — until the day it did.

A key principle of risk management is that we must address low-probability events that have very serious consequences. Mass shootings, especially in schools, certainly qualify.

Since the 2024 Wyoming legislative session, even the excuse that we can’t afford the cost no longer holds water. In truth it never did; these programs are less expensive than hiring a single additional SRO in a district where even two of them can’t be everywhere at once. But this year the Wyoming Legislature established a fund to reimburse the costs of school districts that enact these programs. The excuses for inaction are wearing thin.

It is time, all across Wyoming, to take positive action to secure our schools against lethal threats.

(Bill Tallen is a Wapiti resident and retired federal agent.)