School staff volunteers must get special firearms training because “there is nothing worse than a deranged madman executing child after child after child with nobody to respond,” according to Laura Carno, leader of the pro-gun FASTER Colorado program.

“What happens in these mass killing events, is on average one person is shot every 17 seconds,” Carno said Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” And “if that’s your kid in the hallway, in the cafeteria, in the classroom, how many 17-second intervals are you OK with if you have a school resource officer running toward the scene or a police officer being called to the scene?”

If schools were forced to wait for a law enforcement officer to respond because no armed teachers were at the scene, Carno argued that more children would die.

“The idea of armed staff is to have somebody who can stop the killer as soon as possible,” Carno said. “There is nothing worse than a deranged madman executing child after child after child with nobody to respond.”

Carno estimated that roughly 200 teachers throughout 20-25 school districts in Colorado have completed the FASTER program — named for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response — noting that she was inspired to bring the program to her state after she saw Ohio’s results. The Buckeye State trained more than 1,300 school staff members in 225 districts in five years to respond to shootings, Carno said. Colorado entered its second year in the FASTER program this year.

“It’s a three-day, very intensive training,” Carno said, noting that the trainers are all active-duty law enforcement officers, and some are SWAT team members. “This is very personal to these folks, but it’s very extensive. It’s firearms, it’s situations, and it’s also medical training.”

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Carno accused mainstream media outlets of mischaracterizing the idea of training teachers to respond to active-shooter situations to portray the idea negatively.

“Because they are volunteers, these are folks who already carry concealed firearms outside of work,” Carno said of the program’s participants. “These are people who have taken it seriously before being authorized in their schools, folks who have made the decision outside of work to defend themselves and their families with a firearm, if needed.”

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Carno insisted that “it’s a different kind of person than is being portrayed in the national media as this scared young teacher who doesn’t like guns and somebody is forcing her to carry. We have four active-duty law enforcement trainers who are SWAT team members, who believe in this so much they take vacation time to participate in this training. And that’s what we raise money for.”

Carno said that her organization receives no funding from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and raises all of its money privately in Colorado.

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.