Audio By Carbonatix
Jon Caldara, the boisterous frontman for the Independence Institute, a right-leaning Denver-based think tank, is well known for the delight he takes in tweaking liberal sensibilities – and the organization’s ongoing “Meat and Heat” raffle, whose prizes include a Glock 19 handgun, a quarter of a hog and an eighth of a steer, is specifically designed to do just that.
“We figure that there are two things that every Coloradan should have – a Glock 19 and a freezer full of meat,” Caldara says. “So we thought we’d better put them both together for the ‘Meat and Heat’ raffle. This way, it should scare every progressive in the state that two such distasteful things could be in one raffle.”
But Caldara doesn’t press any joy buzzers while discussing the raffle’s beneficiary: FASTER Colorado, an Independence Institute-affiliated program run by executive director Laura Carno that trains teachers who want to carry a gun in the classroom how to defend themselves and their students should they be confronted by a school shooter.
“My stock-in-trade is to be off-color,” Caldara acknowledges. “That’s what I do. But what Laura does is very somber and very serious. My hope is to get people to buy a raffle ticket for this incredibly worthy cause.”
The idea of armed teachers has been controversial for years. But in a 2018 Westword profile of FASTER Colorado, Carno argued that training educators and other school personnel to use a firearm was the best way to stop shooters.
The multi-day FASTER Colorado program, which is overseen by instructors who are also active law enforcement officials, falls into four main categories. The first is what Carno called “mindset training” – helping teachers who recognize a shooter, most of whom tend to have past history with their target location, “make the mental shift from ‘This is a kid I know’ to ‘He’s trying to kill my students.'” That’s followed by medical instruction (giving participants the skills they need to render first aid, apply tourniquets and so on), tactical-firearms training (maintaining accuracy even while moving, for example), and “force-on-force scenarios” during which “everybody gets to play the good guy, and everybody gets to play the bad guy. And when it’s your turn to be the good guy, you have to solve whatever problem there is – and if it’s somebody trying to kill your students, you need to stop that threat.”
A photo from a FASTER Colorado training session.
Over the intervening years, FASTER Colorado “has really been growing,” Caldara says. “I believe there are now 38 different school districts that have armed staff protecting our kids. Sadly, after every school shooting, more and more people realize that the only workable solution is armed, trained staff that are there to stop a shooter, and stop the bleeding, because, quite simply, school districts will never be able to afford to have armed school-resource officers in the numbers required.”
Caldara points to several incidents during which individuals at the scene of a shooting who carried a concealed weapon were able to save lives, including a 2007 attack on New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the 2021 assault on Olde Town Arvada, and an attempted massacre at an Indiana mall in July. And for those who fear that armed teachers are more likely to create a tragedy than prevent one, “the analogy is armed airline pilots. About one out of every ten flights that people take, there’s an armed pilot who has been trained for one possibility – not to stop drug lords or catch guys who forge checks, but to stop hijackers, because the government can’t afford to put an air marshal in every plane. Imagine if the same type of numbers were in school – how quickly a shooting might end, and what a deterrent that would be.”
Of course, even some police officers who’ve responded to school shootings have balked at rushing into danger, including during the deadly onslaught in Uvalde, Texas, this past May. But Caldara believes teachers would have better success in such a scenario because in order to pass the FASTER Colorado course, “they have to shoot better than a cop does in order to pass their academy training – and unlike the cops at Uvalde, the lives they’re trying to save are their own and their kids’. The motivation is very, very different. And a lot of the schools where teachers have gone through this training are a long way from police. They might be an hour away, and when the cops get there, they might not want to go through that door – which is why it’s important to have armed staff inside that door.”
The winner of the “Meat and Heat” raffle will get the chance to learn about FASTER Colorado personally. A level-one training class is among the prizes, along with a Glock 19 from Colorado Springs-based Shootin’ Den, gear from Englewood’s Bullet Both Ways, and a beef-and-pork package from the Elizabeth Locker Plant, a butcher shop in Elizabeth. The various rewards are valued at $3,000.
For the $25 price of a raffle ticket, “you’ll get the chance, after all this inflation, to finally afford to feed your family throughout the winter and get a Glock 19 before your city council outlaws it,” Caldara says.
The raffle ends on Monday, November 7. Click for more details and to purchase tickets.
