Nearly one-third of Utahns say limiting access to school campuses is the best way to improve school safety, though nearly one-quarter point to enforcement of stricter gun control laws, according to results of a new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll.
The survey of 808 registered voters in Utah was conducted June 16-29, weeks after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 21 people — 19 of them third and fourth grade students and two teachers — and wounded 17 others, among them three officers.
Among Utahns who responded to the poll, 15% said stationing armed security guards at every school would be the best way to improve safety. Another 13% said schools should arm teachers, while 15% said other, without specifying their answer.
Utah Education Association President Heidi Matthews said the poll results reflect an urgency to do something. She noted that just 2% of respondents said “nothing needs to be done.”
Reducing or halting school shootings require a multipronged approach, she said.
“What’s the best way? Well, there is no one best way. We’ve learned that if there was a best way this just wouldn’t continue to be happening. We wouldn’t have children being murdered in our schools and at our Fourth of July parades, you know, people just being senselessly murdered,” Matthews said.
Beyond that, mass shootings occur in other settings besides schools, evidenced by the recent attack during the Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, that killed seven people, or the mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store on May 14, where 10 people perished.
“It’s a community issue, too. It’s not just a school issue. Community safety is school safety,” Matthews said.
As for arming teachers, Matthews said it is “outside the purview of what any educator is trained to do.”
“I have a hard time being told that lives would be saved,” said Matthews, who has been an educator for 30 years.
“If we have the unthinkable happen in our schools in Utah, we want our adults in the schools to be 100% focusing on the protection of kids. To do that simultaneously with potentially being asked to interact with a perpetrator is simply asking too much. There’s too much possibility for an error and for more lives to be jeopardized,” she said.
Just 11% of women polled chose arming teachers as the best way to improve school safety while 15% of male respondents preferred that option. The highest support for arming teachers was among respondents who identified as “very conservative” or “conservative” at 20% and 19%, respectively, and those identifying as Republicans at 17%.
After securing schools, the poll response with the second-highest level of support was enforcing stricter gun control laws.
The recently passed federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act aims to improve school and public safety. It provides billions of dollars for innovative programs to help stop tragedies before they occur, including through investments in mental health, school safety and state-led crisis intervention programs.
Rep. Steve Handy, R-Layton, said there is little appetite in the Utah Legislature for gun control measures. Handy has thrice introduced red flag legislation that would enable a family member or someone from law enforcement to request a court remove firearms from a person in crisis who is a danger to themselves or others.
After pushback from the gun rights lobby and Second Amendment enthusiasts, the measures have never come up for a vote.
“I don’t have any intent to pursue it. It was an idea that was never even voted on. I could never get any support or traction. I was out there on my own on it. I got beat up pretty badly and I shouldn’t have been,” said Handy, who lost the nomination for his Utah House seat at the Republican Party convention earlier this year.
Ardent gun rights supporters called the legislation “a gun grab,” Handy said.
“It’s not a gun grab because then the guns are never fully ever removed. It’s just a pause button to let the person get the mental health help that everyone in society knows is necessary,” he said.
Sadly, mass shootings occur frequently and statistically speaking, there is no reason to believe Utah is immune, he said.
Handy, a gun owner who says he respects the Second Amendment, said he doesn’t want the government to take away his guns, either. He introduced the proposal in the wake of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018, when a teen gunman killed 17 people and wounded 17 others.
“One of those things that people have failed to understand is, this isn’t just police running and taking someone’s guns. This is a temporary halt by a judge based upon a standard. In my attempts at this, we could never get to a comfortable place of due process. I don’t know in Utah if we, in the foreseeable future, ever will,” he said.
Even though 23% of those who responded to the Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll said enforcing stricter gun control laws is the best way to improve school safety, Handy said he has no intention of bringing back a red flag proposal.
“I don’t see the political will in the Utah Legislature to pursue it,” he said. “I just don’t think there’s traction.”