When President Donald Trump suggested arming teachers would make schools safer, many educators recoiled.
As the first-month anniversary of a mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school is marked Wednesday, the debate has gone nationwide.
"If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could end the attack very quickly," Trump said last month following a Feb. 14 shooting rampage that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
While some rolled their eyes, a graduate research project at Purdue Homeland Security Institute bears out the President's theory.
In 2014, Purdue students analyzed FBI active shooter data from past mass shootings and created a detailed computer simulation model that replicates a school assaulted by an active shooter. The study concluded that arming school personnel and locking doors can slow down a shooter and possibly prevent killings.
As other states begin debating Trump's plan to arm teachers, Indiana's overwhelmingly pro-gun rights legislature passed such a measure back in 2013. It allowed for teachers and others to carry arms, but left the decision to local districts.
So far, districts have resisted arming teachers, preferring to let only school resource officers carry firearms.
Lake Station Jr.-Sr. High School, like most schools in Indiana, doesn't arm its teachers, but it does have a districtwide security director, Scott Tokach, a burly former police officer who is the lone school official with a gun.
"I don't like the idea of a knee-jerk policy," said Tokach, referring to teachers carrying firearms. "I haven't had a teacher come to me and say I think I should be armed. For me, I'd need someone trained on a regular basis and meet the criteria."
Principal Christine Pepa said the school has regular lockdown drills and social media posts are monitored. She gives out her own cellphone number for parents to contact her, and there's a school hotline.
The North White School Corp. in Monon, about 18 miles west of Rensselaer, allows administrators to carry a concealed semi-automatic gun while school is in session at and school events.
The school board policy, passed in 2014, is voluntary and two training sessions are required.
Meanwhile, a school safety plan put forward last week by Gov. Eric Holcomb, and agreed to by GOP legislative leaders, calls for $5 million to $7 million in additional money for a program that provides money for school resource officers and other programs.
Local educators have complained that lawmakers have been slashing school safety funding in recent budgets. In 2013, the initial Indiana Secured School Grant Fund boasted $20 million. The amount has been declining.
Lawmakers cut $3.5 million out of the safety grants in 2015, but then-governor and now Vice President Mike Pence restored the money, increasing the 2015-16 funding to $18 million.
Districts with more than 1,000 students can be awarded up to $50,000 toward a resource officer.
Because schools are gun-free zones with multiple doors and options for access, they're viewed as soft targets in the gun debate. Trump said they're "like an invitation for these very sick people" to commit murder.
For the Purdue project, students pored over FBI data from past mass shootings, including Sandy Hook, the 2012 Newtown, Conn., mass shooting that ended with 20 children and six adults dead. They studied police response time in relation to casualties, said the institute's director, J. Eric Dietz, Indiana's first director of Homeland Security. Appointed by Gov. Mitch Daniels, Dietz reorganized the state's public safety planning and response while serving as director until 2008.
In their study, the Purdue students created four scenarios and ran them through the computer models that followed an active shooter in a school. It's available at www.researchgate.net/.
They learned what could seem obvious: if a police officer or other armed school official confronts the shooter, fewer casualties are likely to occur. Dietz said the gun debate is so polarizing, his students sought to use science to inform people in the middle of the debate.
"What we found was profound," said Dietz. He said a single resource officer "or even an armed teacher in a defensive position between attacker and students can reduce the number of victims by up to 70 percent."
Dietz and his students have been presenting their findings at seminars across the country. They're using models now to study stadiums and sporting events.
"My students weren't supporting a certain agenda item. We tried to take a very objective look," said Dietz.
"In all cases, some presence of weapons was an advantage," he said. "Essentially, our model shows what President Trump said after the Florida shooting – arm more people. That's what we predict from the science we built."