On May 28, Republican lawmakers sent Senate Bill 905 to Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe. This is a purely Republican bill: Not one Democrat in either chamber voted for the bill; not one Republican voted against it.
Introduced by David Gregory, a state senator from Chesterfield, SB905 would create a new category of school protection officer: The Missouri Ranger.
The Missouri Ranger bridges the gap between armed teachers/staff and school resource officers, who are sworn officers employed by a law enforcement agency and assigned to a school district or campus.
Missouri Rangers, who may be district employees or volunteers, must complete 160 hours of training. The curriculum will be set by the Missouri Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST) and must include state and federal constitutional and statutory law; firearms training; close quarter combat; de-escalation; active shooter training; defensive tactics; and bomb and arson instruction.
Since it’s fairly common for school protection jobs to be filled by retired law enforcement officers or retired military, Ranger candidates must pass a physical fitness test prior to being admitted for the training program. For those 35 and younger, the test includes doing 40 pushups in less than one minute and running 1.5 miles in under 12 minutes and 30 seconds. The POST Commission will establish tests for candidates older than 35.
“You have to be in physical fitness superior to a Marine,” Gregory said. “Once you pass that fitness test, we then put the rangers through pretty serious training modeled after U.S. Air Marshals.”
After completion of the training, Rangers receive a certificate, a badge, and are vested with limited police powers, including arrest. Their authority is limited to school district property, including buses. They also get the same qualified immunity as regular law enforcement officers.
The school district makes the final decision whether a Ranger will be armed or unarmed, what weapon will be carried, and whether the weapon will be carried openly or concealed.
Of course, the Democrats were having none of this.
“The answer to guns in schools is not more guns in schools,” said state Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs. A St. Louis Democrat, Fuchs prefers mental health support for students.
This is profoundly stupid.
There is a world of difference between a gun in the hands of a school protective officer and a gun in the hands of a teenage gang member or drug dealer. This fact is often missed by those afflicted with acute hoplophobic myopia, such as Rep. Fuchs.
There’s an even bigger difference between the majority of school shooting incidents and mass shootings in schools. These last are the ones Democrats and gun-control freaks in general use to scare the public and traumatize our children.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database*, there were 3,195 school shooting incidents nationwide from 1970 through 2025. In these incidents, there were 3,308 victims with fatal and non-fatal injuries. Nineteen incidents could be considered mass shootings with a total of 368 injuries and deaths.
The deaths would all be classified by the FBI as either NIBRS Code 09A (murder/non-negligent manslaughter) or 13A (aggravated assault). The CDC uses the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition; (ICD-10) Classes X93, X94, and X95, assault with handgun, long gun, and other firearms, respectively.
These are all criminal offenses. Moreover, they are the only types of injury involved. This is the grand total of “gun violence.”
The K-12 SSD looked at 2,735 incidents and divided them into 17 ‘situations’ or root causes. Mass shootings made up slightly more than one-half percent of the situations while escalations of disputes, criminal activity, drive-by shootings, and vandalism accounted for more than 60% of the total.
Which is going to be more useful more of the time? An armed Missouri Ranger or “mental health support for students?”
Sounds like there is room for more guns — In the right hands.
Who has the right hands? As well-known author and Second Amendment champion Cam Edwards says, anyone “(I)n the right place; at the right time; willing and able to do the right thing.”
Compare this to Rep. Fuch’s strategy: Invoking fairy godmothers.
The mental health dodge is a favorite of gun control addicts, regardless of party. Whether it’s denying fundamental rights to young adults or relying on nonexistent mental health markers to quickly and conclusively identify a person’s potential for future violence, there’s gotta be someone singing “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” in the background as they turn pumpkins and mice into squash and roadkill or stigmatize people with legitimate mental health issues who live otherwise healthy, non-violent lives.
There are about 896,000 students enrolled in Missouri K-12 schools. Roughly 280,000 of them are enrolled in high school, which is where the majority of shooting incidents occur. Supplying the range of psychological/psychiatric services needed is going to be challenging from both personnel and budgetary viewpoints.
While we’re supposedly hoping to interdict wannabe mass shooters, the truth is that most injuries and deaths are the result of events that developed rapidly, sometimes within minutes. Disputes, gang and criminal activity, can quickly escalate. Drive-by shootings may or may not involve any planning. Mental health providers will have difficulty predicting and zero ability to stop mass shootings.
On top of everything else, Missouri is not socially homogeneous. The state includes St. Louis, which has one of the highest homicide rates of any city in the world. The murder rate in the Missouri part of Kansas City was more than twice as high as the Kansas side in 2025. On the other hand, Jefferson City, the state capital, had zero murders in 2024 and 2025.
If Missouri could exile St. Louis and Kansas City, the state’s murder rate would plunge by 53 percent.
So what’s the “mental health support” plan, assuming no assistance from the denizens of Fantasyland? Study it to death? Hum a few bars and fake it? Or do like they do with every gun control fail and ignore it?
I have seldom heard of it in the media or from the gun-grabbers, but the K-12 SSD includes 230 reports of school shootings that were averted.
The list even includes a 2023 intervention in Platte County, Missouri. An 18-year-old was planning to carry out a mass shooting with a higher body count than the 2007 slaughter at Virginia Tech, one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.
How was this potential tragedy averted? By members of the public providing tips to authorities, followed up by quick action. Based on reports of the incidents, this was the case in virtually every one of the successful interventions.
Proof of this comes from a high-profile failure: The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
The state commission formed to investigate the incident blamed the deaths and injuries on the shooter, but blamed the Broward County Public Schools, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI for allowing it to happen. The FBI received tips on two occasions but never even forwarded them to its Miami field office.
There’s nothing wrong with improving the quality and availability of mental health care in the United States. However, expecting it to prevent school shootings is unrealistic to the point of being delusional.
On the other hand, we know from experience that a good guy with a gun can end a mass shooting and the quicker the response, the better the outcome.
In addition, the opportunity for smaller school districts to have an armed, well-trained, and licensed law enforcement officer on a volunteer basis could provide an unmatchable measure of security for students, teachers and staff and assurance for parents and family members.
In Texas, we’ve had our School Marshal program since 2013. No problems, so far, but we still rely heavily on retired law enforcement officers. The Missouri Ranger program places an emphasis on attracting younger candidates with a higher level of physical fitness. This means they will likely be able to respond more quickly to threats.
Missouri citizens should urge Governor Kehoe to sign SB 905 without waiting until mid-July.
*Raw statistics sourced from the K-12 School Shooting Database copyright © 2025 David Reidman. Other statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Census Bureau, the FBI, Missouri State Highway Patrol, The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, Kansas City (KS) Police Department, Kansas City (MO) Police Department. Analysis by the Second Amendment Society of Texas exclusively for AmmoLand.
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About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
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