To fight school shootings, Utah allows teachers to carry a gun at school – and many are choosing to arm themselves and are taking combat shooting courses as preparation

Ryan Ferree, 33, is a keen shooter. If he could, he would shoot until the 160-decibel sound of a gunshot didn’t faze him. He would shoot so often that he wouldn’t freeze up if he had to aim at somebody he knew.



Ferree wasn’t always interested in guns. He got his concealed-carry permit in March, after becoming a teacher. Three months later, in June, he’s taking a local combat shooting course offered to teachers in St George, Utah.

Utah is one of 14 US states where teachers can carry a gun at school. Following the shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, Rowdy’s Range started offering the class – which normally costs almost $800 – free of charge to teachers.

One of the course instructors, Brett Pruitt, 38, believes that teachers have the right to be armed if they choose: “We give our children to educators for four to six hours a day and trust them with their safety. My personal opinion is we should give them the means to [keep those children safe].”

School principals aren’t allowed to ask teachers whether they carry a weapon on premises, so there’s no official figure on how many do, but gun rights groups guess it’s around 1%. In March, classes were often fully booked, but when I visit, five people turn up in total across two separate 12-person classes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Gunfighting 101 for Teachers’, a course taught by Rowdy Reeve and Brett Pruitt at a gun range in Hurricane, Utah. Photograph: Mikayla Whitmore/The Guardian

Regardless, range owner Rowdy Reeve, 41, sees it as his responsibility to provide the course: “If teachers are going to take a weapon into school, they should be trained to use one,” he says.

Ferree decided he wanted to carry after his first lockdown drill. The drills are designed to prepare teachers and students for an active shooter situation; the students hide in blind spots in their classrooms while someone pretends to force entry. A former military man, Ferree didn’t like having to hide in the corner: “It makes me sick to think that if someone came in and tried to harm my kids, I’d be nothing more than a meat shield.”

He is one of the many teachers emboldened by President Trump’s proposition that highly trained teachers might be able to stop shootings in their schools. For Ferree, it’s all a matter of practice: “I didn’t know how to teach math before I tried it,” he says.

Another math teacher, Michelle Oldroyd, 53, rebuffs him: “There are a lot more repercussions for getting this wrong, than messing up a math class.”

The repercussions for carrying a weapon can, indeed, be serious. When a Utah teacher, Michelle Montgomery-Ferguson, 39, accidentally shot herself in the leg at Westbrook elementary school in 2014, it didn’t matter that she didn’t remember pulling the trigger. It didn’t even matter that the gun, placed on the toilet paper dispenser in a school bathroom, wasn’t in her hand when it discharged. The mistake was enough for her to be charged with a class B misdemeanor, with the possibility of six months in prison. Montgomery-Ferguson escaped jail time, but shortly after she was charged, she resigned from the school where she had taught sixth grade for 14 years.

Pruitt and Reeve are ex-law enforcement. During two days on the outdoor range, they show teachers how to effectively conceal themselves behind barrels that they pretend are bookcases, and how to dodge gunfire in a hallway. They will practice shooting while sitting behind a desk, and how to quickly draw a weapon and aim in one swift movement.

At times, it feels like something out of a shoot ’em up video game. The course does not include any de-escalation training or lessons on how to safely store your gun in the classroom, and there is no discussion of racial biases and how to militate against them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ryan Ferree, 33, during a training class for teachers. Ferree, who teaches seventh and eighth grade math, said it’s all a matter of practice: ‘I didn’t know how to teach math before I tried it.’ Photograph: Mikayla Whitmore/The Guardian

“That stuff’s supposed to come before this class,” says Pruitt. “If you can resolve the situation any other way, [you] should. But if a teacher ends up in a gunfight, I want them to be able to fight their way out without getting harmed.”

On the car journey back, Reeve asks what I’m planning to write. I tell him about the concerns of some locals: that the existence of the class, whether intentionally or not, could pressure some teachers to carry guns when they don’t want to, or pressure them to be heroes when they aren’t trained to.

I also tell him that in Utah, like the rest of the country, it seems like what makes some communities feel safe against gun violence is exactly what makes other communities feel unsafe. “I see that,” says Reeve.

• • •

The idea of training teachers to shoot has been met with mixed reactions across America. The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ lobby, is against it. After the Parkland shooting, 14 states put forward bills to allow teachers to be armed, but only one of them – Florida – passed the law. Students involved in the nationwide March for Our Lives initiative have expressed concerns about the proposals.



In Utah, at a suicide prevention meeting, many feel a suicide-focused strategy would help deal with school shootings. “Most mass shootings have been driven by suicidal ideation,” says Craig Bryan, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Utah.

Cathy Barber, another member of the suicide prevention squad and an academic at the Harvard School of Public Health, believes that political polarisation between left and right has fueled an inability to move forward on gun reform. “Sometimes I feel good-hearted anti-gun groups think agreeing to focus on suicide means they’ve conceded to the gun lobby,” says Barber.

But while gun lobbyists in the room are happy to discuss suicide prevention, discussions around police-on-citizen shootings, gang violence and mass shootings seem less welcome.

Catherine Voutaz, a mother who recently lost her 15-year-old son Chandler to suicide, was surprised and disappointed to discover that Chandler’s school district spent grant money on training for live intruder drills. “Mass shootings make up a tiny proportion of gun deaths,” Voutaz says, outside the meeting. “Most people don’t even recognise how big a problem suicide is, because of the media focus on school shootings.”

While training teachers to shoot has been one of the most controversial recommendations for solving school gun violence, it’s not the only option being discussed. Trump’s national school safety commission has been tasked with looking at everything from video games to how journalists cover mass shootings. Schools across the country are installing facial recognition systems, metal detectors and more police officers in schools.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A paper target at the shooting class for teachers. Photograph: Mikayla Whitmore/The Guardian

The effectiveness of such police officers – called school resource officers, or SROs – is debated. While Scot Peterson, the police officer at Parkland, became a figure of national hatred and ridicule for not entering the building where Nikolas Cruz was shooting students with an assault rifle, many pointed out there was little he could have done against an AR-15.

Justin Chapman, a captain at the Sandy police department in Utah, worked in schools for decades, and now runs a private business training police to work in schools as SROs.

Chapman prevented his first school shooting 20 years ago, two days into his first role as an SRO, when he found an assault rifle on a student.

He believes developing relationships so students feel comfortable confiding in officers is the most important part of the role: “In many cases where there’s been a school shooting, a student has known [it was coming] but didn’t feel safe enough to tell anybody,” Chapman says.

Utah has a fraught history with law enforcement in schools. In 2014, SROs arrested 299 students. While school-related arrests have almost halved since 2012, racial disparities have gone up – Native Americans were 8.8 times more likely than their white peers to be arrested in 2014 and Pacific Islanders were 3.3 times more likely.

Chapman disagrees that SROs are racially biased: “If more Latinos are committing more crimes in a school they’ll get arrested more.”



But the local non-profit Voices for Utah Children, which conducts research on the school-to-prison pipeline, disagrees. “Are non-white kids more violent, or more likely to commit crimes?” asks policy analyst Anna Thomas. “There’s no data to show that’s true, all that’s shown is that they get caught more.”

• • •

When it comes to solving gun violence, many in Utah believe in putting the good of the majority first, even if that entails some necessary evils. Anna Thomas believes that’s a problem: “When we’re talking about school security and how to keep kids safer, we always have to ask: which kids? If it’s always black and brown kids who feel less safe, those solutions are not appropriate for our society.”

Saida Dahir, 17, is a March for Our Lives coordinator in Salt Lake City. For her, arming teachers and increasing law enforcement in schools will inevitably end up sacrificing the safety of minority students for the peace of mind of their white counterparts. She points out that the existence of these measures doesn’t make everyone feel more secure: “The fear of guns, and the fear of cops is in our blood. We see videos of our communities torn apart by both every day,” she says.

Dahir is a Somalian refugee who escaped to Kenya with her family as a baby and came to the US as a three-year-old. She thought the US was a mythical place of dreams: “I figured, people don’t die here, right? It’s all Hollywood and Disneyland,” she says.

Today, Dahir finds her schools militarised, her school hallways a danger zone, and her black skin and hijab an invitation for suspicion and violence. When she first got to the US, her mother, a housemaid, prayed in closets while on the job, for fear of being seen.

Like many students of colour in Utah, Dahir says that resource officers tend to treat minority students differently – finding undue reason to chastise them, or to suspect they are up to no good. She isn’t reassured by the push for more security in schools: “If these rules make everybody safer, why do I find myself flinching my way through school?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shell casings during the class. Photograph: Mikayla Whitmore/The Guardian

If forced to choose, she and some other minority students say they would rather have armed teachers in schools than more law enforcement.

Yet many people do feel safer around more cops, more guns and less gun restrictions, and believe the second amendment is intended to help American citizens defend themselves from the threat of dictatorship.

In Utah, this is intensified. Many people in the largely Mormon state are shaped by stories of persecution in their family history. They tell stories of how Mormons were terrorized and chased out of the eastern US and forced to settle in territories that weren’t under the control of the US government at the time. Central to this story is how necessary guns were, and still are, to protect Mormons from a tyrannical government.

Dahir feels that the same rights are not afforded to black people. In May this year, her childhood friend Elijah Smith was shot to death by Salt Lake City police. Smith, who had run away from police who suspected him of stealing a cellphone, was killed while raising his hands to surrender.

His death came months after Patrick Harmon was Tasered and shot to death by police for cycling in Salt Lake City without proper lighting in August 2017. The district attorney’s office initially refused to release footage of the arrest; after public protest, the footage, finally released in October, showed a man shot in the back while running away.

“Are these the people that they’re sending to protect us?” asks Dahir.

• • •

Utah’s school safety commission recently voted for modest gun reforms such as background checks for secondhand sales and extreme risk protection laws, which allow authorities to seize an individual’s guns if they are judged to pose a risk to themselves or others. But there is still a long way to go in Utah on gun reform.

When March for Our Lives students marched in Utah, gun rights advocates organised a March Before Our Lives counter-protest.

The Utah Sports Shooting Council chairman, Clark Aposhian, owned over 300 guns when he was arrested in 2014 after driving a 2.5-tonne military vehicle on to his ex-wife’s property and allegedly threatening to run over her partner. (Aposhian was fined for disorderly conduct, but domestic violence charges against him were dropped.) After authorities confiscated his guns, Aposhian became a vocal gun rights activist.

Aposhian, who was on Utah’s school safety commission, is adamant that schools can be made safer without gun reform: “We need to enforce our existing laws,” he says. “Until then don’t start asking for any new laws that are gonna only restrict me and not the criminals.”

He does accept that there are some limitations: “People who make poor decisions shouldn’t be allowed to bear arms. For every right comes regulations,” he says.

Here, he is referencing what he believes is a difference between the way that gun violence manifests itself in different cultures. “White people kill themselves. That’s not the same in African American or Hispanic communities. They’re preying upon each other,” he says.

For Aposhian, the way that gun violence has to be dealt with is simple: more arrests. He points out that out of tens of thousands of cases of felons purchasing guns during the Obama administration, only 44 were ever arrested.

These communities, says Aposhian, are mainly minority areas – in contrast to the white community, which, he says, has “very few true firearm incidents; ours are mostly related to drugs and alcohol”.

Aposhian doesn’t believe in taking a similarly heavy-handed approach when it comes to criminalising people who fail to lock away their guns, however: “I prefer the carrot approach. Let’s give these families some money to buy a gun safe, then talk about why they should lock it away.”

Aposhian’s blind spot seems to reflect a broader problem with the US’s gun culture – an inability to see why macho solutions to gun violence, like arming teachers, are experienced differently by people of colour.

When I ask him whether this is unfair, he’s frank in his response: “Well, to be honest, I haven’t thought about that,” he says.