Patrick Neville survived one of the most deadly school shootings in history, at Colorado’s Columbine High School.
Now, in his capacity as Colorado House Minority Leader, he thinks he found the solution to preventing mass shootings: allowing more guns on campuses.
Neville was a sophomore at Columbine during the 1999 mass shooting, where two teens killed 12 students and a teacher, before killing themselves.
Neville believes that more of his classmates would have survived the attack had members of the faculty been able to carry their firearms on campus. He has now introduced a bill that will allow law-abiding concealed-carry permit holders to carry weapons on campus.
Under current Colorado law, gun owners are allowed to bring guns onto school campuses, but must lead them locked in their cars—effectively creating “gun-free zones.”
“Time and time again we point to the one common theme with mass shootings, they occur in gun-free zones,” Neville explained to The Washington Times.
He added that citizens should be able “to defend themselves and most importantly our children from the worst-case scenarios.”
Neville has introduced the bill annually since 2014, when he was first elected to Colorado state government. But his proposal has gained new attention after last week’s massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—where a former student opened fire and killed 17 people—and the resulting national conversation about how best to keep America’s children safe.
