As Pam cracks the door to the front office, her hand creeps to the gun strapped at her hip. She’s in her 40s, with dark-rimmed glasses and a ponytail poking through the back of a baseball cap. At five foot six, she is not an imposing presence, but then again, what kindergarten teacher is?

She peers inside and sees a parent—Mr. Brown, who she’d heard was locked in a custody dispute with his ex-wife—shouting at Betsy, the school secretary, something about how he wants to see his son. And then he takes out a pistol of his own and holds it right up to her head.

Pam is lucky; Mr. Brown doesn’t notice her. She draws, her elbows locking out as her eyes settle between the sights. But in the split second before her index finger depresses the trigger, she hesitates. I have to try, right?

“FREEZE!” she shouts.

BANG.

Mr. Brown murders Betsy and swings the barrel toward Pam, cursing.

BANG.

Pam sends a bullet into him, and he staggers back; a second round to his chest, and he crumples to the ground. She exhales, unsure what to do next, standing over two lifeless bodies when there could have been one.

Whenever Pam tells me about her adventures wrangling a classroom full of 5-year-olds, she can't help but smile. “Kindergartners are like sponges,” she says. “They love to learn.”*

We meet on the first day of FASTER Saves Lives, a three-day “active killer” response course in rural Adams County, Ohio, where school staff members learn how to carry a gun on campus and, should it one day become necessary, how to shoot to kill. By the end of this year, its sixth, around 2,000 people from 15 states—including me, Pam, and about two dozen other men and women enrolled in this session—will have completed the training, which includes the above exercise, carried out in a controlled setting with actors and Airsoft pistols that fire plastic pellets.

*Names and some identifying details of enrollees have been changed throughout this story.

As of three months ago, Pam had never shot a handgun in her life. The night before attending an eight-hour gun-safety seminar—a prerequisite for obtaining her $67 concealed-carry permit—a cousin had taken her out on his property and let her squeeze off a few practice rounds, just so she could see which make and model fit her hands best. Over breakfast, we overhear a pair of veteran shooters chatter away about the intricacies of the gauntlet that awaits us, and Pam is all nerves. “I feel like I’m in over my head,” she says.

She’s been a teacher for 14 years; once, I return to my seat to find “Pam was here!” scrawled on the front of my notebook. Whenever she gets a fleeting bar of cell service, she calls or texts her husband and three children to check in. He knows what she is doing this week, but the kids have no idea. She confesses it feels like she’s “living a secret life.”

When she started her career, Pam’s salary was $23,000. (“If I ever see $55,000, I’ll be 105 years old,” she says, laughing.) The district is covering her hotel and ammunition for training, but she paid for her new $500 Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun and for all her gear—magazines, magazine pouches, a holster, safety equipment, and that concealed-carry permit—out of her own pocket.

The course is offered by an Ohio nonprofit called the Buckeye Firearms Foundation, which uses donations to fund scholarships for most attendees. But since Parkland, overwhelming demand has prevented the Foundation from being able to cover everyone. Before the shooting, two dozen openings remained for all of summer 2018; in the months that followed, organizers sometimes fielded that number of applications in a single day. Eventually, they were able to accept several hundred of them in about a dozen overflow classes. Even so, today about 2,000 people are still sitting on a waitlist.