We are trying not to judge House Minority Leader Patrick Neville by his spectacularly bad proposal to allow anyone with a concealed-carry permit — an easy-to-obtain document in Colorado — to bring their gun onto school campuses.

We’ll just leave it at expressing great gratitude to the Democrats who killed House Bill 1037 on Wednesday.

Instead we’ll judge Neville, who was a student at Columbine High School when the 1999 massacre occurred, by his much more thoughtful, albeit unsuccessful, proposal last legislative session to allow teachers who have concealed-carry licenses to carry guns on school grounds only if they also complete a local school board-approved handgun safety training course provided by a county sheriff.

Colorado law already allows school districts to certify teachers as safety officers so they can carry a concealed weapon on campus; Neville’s bill would have added an extra layer of training to that reality. Even though we are not fans of arming teachers with guns, we thought Neville’s proposal was good enough to support, especially considering the vulnerability of some rural schools without school resource officers.

However, training and arming teachers is not a silver-bullet solution to the countless school shootings that have taken hundreds of lives in the 19 years since Columbine. President Donald Trump should focus his efforts elsewhere, and consider the implications of a federal mandate that local schools arm 20 percent of their teachers and remember that teachers, like soldiers who turn on their own, can be suicidal and homicidal, too.

We’d much rather see federal and state funding for school resource officers and construction projects at schools to limit the number of entrances and secure the remaining entrances so those with ill intent can’t enter. Our schools do need more armed officers and better security.

But as we tragically learned from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, sometimes school resource officers can fail at their job too. The armed officer who was on duty the day of the shooting waited outside during precious minutes when the shooter was still actively firing his weapon at defenseless students.

So when a crazed person determined to kill our nation’s youth is not deterred by the promise of good guys with guns on campuses, the final defense is sadly to pray they don’t have access to a weapon, especially one designed to kill many people quickly.

The most dangerous capability of the civilian-grade, military-style assault rifle commonly referred to as an AR-15 is the ability to fire a high-velocity, high-caliber round like the .223 Remington and 5.56 NATO. Many semiautomatic rifles, even those that look like traditional hunting rifles, share that capability.

But assault rifles combine quick fire, high-velocity, high-caliber bullets with 100-round magazines or quick release 30-round magazines, making it possible to slaughter 17 people in a matter of minutes. Add cosmetic features like a pistol grip that makes it easy to fire the weapon while stalking a target and the assailant becomes hard to stop.

We hope that as they work to arm teachers, Trump and Neville — who met Thursday at the White House to discuss school safety in a small group — also work to rein in the features on the assault rifles commonly used in mass shootings that help make them more deadly.

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