In most of my now twice-weekly columns, I try to inject a bit of humor into my writings. I’ve found that touch of absurdity can often help with the messaging. But today, I’m not going to make any jokes and I’m not going to offer any solutions on the issue that breaks the hearts of Americans all too often – school shootings.

I say I have no solutions because I have, quite frankly, lost any hope that we can make meaningful progress on this issue, and it breaks my heart, yet again. The reason I am so negative is because of Sandy Hook. I had long said that this great country of ours would not be shocked into action until a schoolroom full of tiny precious children was shot up. I hoped against hope that such a scenario would never take place, even as I believed such a horror might be the only thing to move the needle on guns.

Then that horrible day in December 2012 took twenty tiny lives, 6- and 7-year olds’, and six brave adults, when a monster whose name I shall never write, as he deserves to be forgotten, expressed what some consider his 2nd Amendment right to own an assault rifle.

We saw some efforts to at least smooth the sharp edges of some gun ownership here in Colorado, following our own tragedy in an Aurora theater. We saw limits on magazine size and better background checks. And then we saw two state senators recalled. And so, my friends, I’ve lost hope that we can make any real progress on this issue until there is significant and far-reaching changes in the make up of our state legislatures and the US Congress.

When I ran for Congress here in the greater Colorado Springs area in 2008, I received a questionnaire from the NRA. I filled it out and was awarded a grade of A-Q, meaning a grade of A, but only based on the questionnaire, as I had no voting record in Congress yet upon which to judge me. I’m a gun owner and a former military cop, but I also believe in reasonable and meaningful gun laws. So how did I get the A grade? Well, as it turns out, the NRA very much wants to be able to point to all the politicians who got A grades, implying the elected folks agree with the NRA. Their little trick, at least in 2008, was to ask very broad questions that were easy to agree with. I was asked, for example, do I oppose “unreasonable” restrictions on ammunition purchases. Sure, though I suspect the NRA and I might differ on what makes a purchase “unreasonable.”

And now we have a president who thinks the solution to school shootings is to make them a “hardened” facility, with all the features and charm of a prison, frankly. But Mr. Trump’s most nonsensical and dangerous idea is his proposal to arm teachers.

There are a number of challenges with this idea. For example, to be effective, the teacher must have the gun on his or her person at all times. Teachers walk the aisles of their class rooms. If thousands of teachers are armed, do you honestly think there will be no accidents, no silly kid who thinks it would be funny to grab the teacher’s gun as he or she walks past?

The fact is a “good guy with a gun” is often a dangerous thing. Putting on my old cop hat, I would sure hate to arrive at a school shooting, or a church shooting, or, say, an outdoor concern in Las Vegas to find a number of “good guys” running around with guns, as I try to find and neutralize the bad guy.

And that is as a trained cop. A study of the New York City Police should remind us that real life is very different from the movies when it comes to even the good guys shooting. That study found that when trained police officers were involved in shootings, they hit their targets between 17% and 40% of the time. So even in the best of situations, cops missed 60% of the time. Do you think even trained teachers, in the panic and stress that are present in a school shooting, would be able to hit the bad guy and far more importantly, not hit the innocent students, at even half that rate?

We need an adult discussion on reasonable gun control. But as long as even discussing the issue is viewed by the NRA and its minions as an evil first step down a slippery slope, I have no answers.