If State Sen. Larry Crowder has his way, the next session of the Colorado Legislature will focus on keeping schoolchildren alive when a criminal shows up with a gun.

As Colorado mourned the latest school shooting the first week of May at the STEM School Highlands Ranch, Crowder quietly announced his plan for a bill requiring a new state “task force” of security experts. The panel would review school safety statewide, making recommendations for protecting students, teachers, visitors and parents from violent predators who make big headlines preying on schools — institutions widely known as easy and defenseless targets.

“Some school districts in the state have good security and have the means to pay for it,” said Crowder, an Alamosa Republican, as quoted in the Pueblo Chieftain. “Others, especially in rural areas, don’t have much at all.”

The senator explains hospitals throughout Colorado have conducted security reviews and funded advanced security measures. Those include everything from armed guards to metal detectors and bag searches at entrances.

With every high-profile school shooting comes a nationwide debate about how we can stop the next one, or the next several. Liberal Democrats seize the moment to preach the perceived merits of gun control. The other side talks about armed janitors, coaches, and teachers who might just stop an armed predator minutes before cops arrive.

We talk about widespread mental illness, as it seems common sense to conclude one cannot be mentally healthy and shoot up a crowd.

Increasingly, in the wake of mass shootings, the discussion turns to on-site security measures — as in, the lack thereof.

The 12 workers killed in Virginia Beach, Va., on Friday took fire in one of the city’s “open-government” facilities that had no entry-point security. By contrast, attorneys and the general public pass through metal detectors to enter the Virginia Beach courthouse.

In a growing number of jurisdictions, people walk through metal detectors to renew license plates or pay traffic fines. Maybe we should do so when entering schools.

A serious, comprehensive approach to security cannot come too soon to please former Colorado Springs Mayor Steve Bach. Elected in a 2011 runoff, Bach felt responsible to ensure his city never became the site of a mass shooting. He considered schools most vulnerable.

Not long after taking office, he initiated conversations with public safety experts in his police department and other law enforcement agencies. They told him the quickest and most practical defense against school shootings would begin at the doors. Do not let anyone, they advised, walk in with unauthorized guns, knives or explosives.

One expert told Bach how proper security measures could have foiled the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which a killer shot his way through a door to subsequently kill 20 children and six adults in Connecticut in 2012.

“So I made a point of contacting superintendents for most or all of the school districts in our area,” Bach recalls. “It was striking to me the reaction I got.”

Bach told them what he had learned. He suggested schools consider locking classroom doors after instruction begins. They should invest in security cameras, armed guards and even metal detectors. Schools might consider entrances similar to those at a growing number of municipal buildings, courthouses and entertainment venues.

He anticipated schools would raise the issue of costs, which seemed a reasonable point of concern. He planned to help them work through that obstacle. Maybe voters would fund a tax increase to enhance school safety. Officials with the city and school districts could discuss possible cost-sharing.

Those discussions did not take place. Most school administrators, he said, readily dismissed all ideas to enhance security before they mentioned the costs.

“Mostly, I was told these security measures would not be welcoming to parents, visitors or children. They would negatively impact the learning environment,” Bach said. “I was taken aback that in the wake of some of these massacres, we were worried about making people uncomfortable with security measures that we encounter all over town to protect adults.”

Bach found exceptions to the security resistance. Public charter schools, he said, had impressive security measures relative to those of traditional attendance centers.

“One of the charters had a two-step security process,” Bach recalled. “They knew I was coming to give an award. I was riding with the police chief. As we entered the school grounds, we were stopped by an armed guard. They stopped us again at the front door. Even though they knew who I was, I had to show my ID before I could enter that school — and I was the mayor accompanied by the police chief.

“That’s the kind of security I wanted to see for all of our schools. Protecting our children should be as important — or more important — than anything else we protect.”

Critics of fortifying schools with courthouse-style security have an argument greater than the concern about disruption and comfort level. Some think the risk of dying in a school shooting is so minuscule we need no expensive security.

David Ropeik is among those downplaying the risk of school shootings. A Harvard instructor, Ropeik wrote the book “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”

Ropeik crunched the numbers, not long after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida left 17 dead and 17 injured.

Factoring about 200 documented school shooting deaths since Colorado’s Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, Ropeik calculated the risk of death by a school shooting, on any given day, at “roughly 1 in 614,000,000.” That means someone buying a Powerball ticket has a greater chance to win the jackpot, with odds of 1 in 292,201,338.

“It’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports,” Ropeik wrote in The Washington Post.

He concedes the low-risk factor means little in the collective American psyche after the news comes on with growing body counts and footage of bleeding kids.

“Statistics seem cold and irrelevant compared with how the evil of a school shooting makes us feel,” Ropeik wrote.

“The victims are children, and research on the psychology of risk has found that few risks worry us more than threats to kids.”

Indeed, far more kids die in car crashes while traveling to and from schools. But absent a major school bus crash, they don’t die collectively in momentary events that leave communities mourning a loss of lives and semblance of safety they once had.

And despite the rationality of statistical data, parents don’t feel good leaving children at schools in the aftermath of a mass shooting. When they drop off their kids, they want a sense they could not leave them in a safer place.

Margie Nelson doesn’t care what any statistician tells her about the low probability of a school shooting taking the life of any of her kids. For her, school shootings have hit too close to home to be seen as statistical abstracts.

Nelson’s son, 15-year-old Jeremy, attends STEM School Highlands Ranch. He missed school the day of the shooting, an absence his parents consider an act of God. His mother stopped just short of taking him to school in the afternoon that day, where he would have joined a classroom targeted by a shooter.

Jeremy hangs out in a circle of four other teenage boys who play video games together. One of the boys, a Florida transplant, survived the Marjory Stoneman shooting. Another was in close proximity to one of the shooters at STEM.

“So, that means two out of those five boys — who are my son’s closest friends — have been exposed to violence at their schools,” she said. “How can I say ‘this rarely happens, so you are safe.’ Our world is increasingly violent, and it filters into our schools now.”

Nelson and her husband, Rich, say the STEM school shooting has changed their lives, disrupting their sense of security and peace.

“That first week after the shooting, we went through serious mood swings,” Rich Nelson said. “Margie would cry at the drop of a hat. I was emotionally all over the board. And our son wasn’t even in school that day. So you can imagine how the other parents must feel.”

“It’s just a nightmare,” Margie says.

She works as a preschool teacher in the Littleton School District and was home when the STEM shooting began. She heard about it in a text from her principal, who ordered the school on lockdown status.

Nelson turned on the local TV news, as she and Jeremy stood in shock.

“First they said one student was shot,” Margie recalls. “Then two, three, eight. We were glued to the TV, and Jeremy was furiously texting friends to see if they were OK. Later we found out a bullet had come through the English class, where he was supposed to be that afternoon. The bullet hit one of the students. I could have lost my boy.”

As a teacher, Margie wants enhanced security. Her husband concurs.

The couple says entry-point security is relatively lax at STEM, and at the school in which Margie teaches. Both schools typically lock their main entrances and a school employee buzzes visitors in. No one checks backpacks or bags.

“A gun should not be able to get past the front door of a school,” Rich Nelson insists.

The STEM shooters were students who easily brought guns through the main entrance in a guitar case no one inspected.

“How can you not have somebody inspect what kids bring into a school?” Bach asks with a tone of incredulity. “You can’t get into a Rockies or a Broncos game without someone knowing exactly what is in your bag.”

The Nelsons attend a church near their home that has a routine plain-clothed security detail of volunteer parishioners packing heat. Their church, they say, is far safer than their children’s schools.

“We have three people armed during every service, and we know where they are,” Rich Nelson says.

“And we have a person stationed outside, carrying concealed. When I hear a politician say we can’t afford better security for schools, or they express disinterest in the topic, I just want to ask them ‘why?’ Our church can do it.”

In addition to better entry security measures, the Nelsons believe schools should provide training and allow at least some teachers to work while armed — a controversial topic gaining momentum with each high-profile school shooting.

The Denver Post reports Colorado is among at least nine states that allow teachers to work while armed, and a handful of other state legislatures are slowing moving to allow it.

Of Colorado’s 181 public school districts, at least 30 allow teachers to carry concealed. Liability underwriters typically establish minimum training standards and use-of-force policies for those districts.

Like most districts, Littleton doesn’t allow teachers to carry guns in school.

“We (teachers) are trained to just hold off, evade, and hide because police should be there in five minutes,” Margie Nelson said. “As a preschool teacher, I think teachers should be carrying guns. Those are my babies and my students, and nobody is going to come through that door and hurt them while we wait for the police. So, I’m all for people being armed at school.”

Rich Nelson conceals a handgun and has a permit to do so. “But, when I go into STEM School the irony is I have to take my gun off and leave it in the car,” he said.

“The kids can come in with a gun, but we can’t come in to protect them,” Margie said.

Such was the dilemma for Vice Principal Joel Myrick, years before school shootings became seemingly routine. October 1, 1997, was to be an ordinary day at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss. Myrick, a military veteran, typically concealed a semi-automatic Colt .45 officer’s model. Just not at school.

That morning, like all others, Myrick obeyed the law and left his handgun in the pickup outside a no-gun zone surrounding the school.

That same morning, a student at the high school woke up with plans to break an assortment of laws. He fatally stabbed his mother as she prepared for a morning jog. He stole his mother’s car, the family’s deer rifle, and drove to the school with plans for mass murder. He arrived and started shooting fellow students.

Myrick could have stopped him soon, but his gun was in the truck. He ran to retrieve it.

Upon his return to the school, the shooter was fleeing by car with plans to shoot up nearby Pearl Junior High School.

The shooter’s attempt to flee ended when Myrick pointed his gun, ordered him to the ground and held him at gunpoint until police arrived.

“I asked him his name,” Myrick told me in 1999. “He said ‘you know me, Mr. Myrick. Remember? I gave you a discount on your pizza delivery last week.”

About a month after the Columbine massacre, Myrick told me he resented the gun law. It gave the killer time to shoot nine students, killing two.

He explained how fellow teachers at a Harvard fellowship frowned on him using a gun to detain a school shooter, even though he helped end the violence without firing a shot.

Almost 20 years after that conversation, Myrick told The New York Times he opposes arming teachers.

“Teachers have to teach, and that’s what they should be doing,” Myrick told the Times, as quoted in an article Feb. 21, 2018. “It doesn’t matter what a pistolero you are, or think you are. You don’t need to be in school in charge of protecting children.”

Instead, Myrick explained his long-held advocacy of schools hiring trained personnel, possibly retired law enforcement officers or military veterans, to protect every school.

Like so many suggesting or demanding enhanced school security, Myrick suggests society spare no expense.

“We protect our banks that way,” Myrick told the Times. “We protect things we love. America protects things it loves. We don’t care if it’s expensive.”

Americans should perceive schools as the safest environments for children, where faculty serve in loco parentis — “in the place of a parent.”

For that to happen, by whatever means, the mass shootings must end.

Wayne Laugesen is the Editorial Page editor of The Gazette.