Neither officials from the National Rifle Association nor the Kansas State Rifle Association returned calls for this article.

An NRA spokesman told The New York Times that the group supported and lobbied for the South Dakota legislation.

Even without legislative action, some think guns might still legally find their way into Kansas schools. The state association of school boards contends existing law might already give superintendents the power to authorize their staff to carry firearms.

Some teachers say they feel vulnerable in their classroom, noting there’s not much that would keep an intruder out.

“We’re really just sitting ducks here,” said Tina Keith, a Shawnee Mission social studies teacher.

Keith would support letting teachers carry concealed weapons if the faculty had training beyond the eight hours of instruction spelled out in the state’s concealed-carry law.

“Having the general public believing or knowing that people within the school are armed or trained would be a deterrent,” she said.

Yet other teachers and some parents aren’t ready to put triggers at the ready.

“The people that would have guns — they’re not trained to be a police officer that knows how to attack a situation,” said Randy Davis, a retired Merriam police officer and the father of two high school students.

“If you are putting a life-and-death piece of equipment into your hands, are you prepared to take the next step?”

Some area school districts are cool to the idea of letting staff carry weapons.

“It just makes no sense,” said Shawnee Mission Superintendent Gene Johnson. “There are better ways for us to address safety issues than putting a gun in everybody’s hand.”

Blue Valley Superintendent Tom Trigg said he did not expect his district to allow employees to carry weapons if the bill became law.

Both districts are participating in a school safety project — called Defense of our Schools — that involves roughly 200 school officials and police officers from across Miami and Johnson counties.

Created in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, it intends to identify the best practices for school safety.

“We’ve got a good plan,” said Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass, “but it needs tweaking.”

Meanwhile, schools in other parts of Kansas have started taking action to protect students in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting.

The Emporia School Board voted in January to post armed guards — both retired police officers — at the school district’s middle school and high school. The guards started Feb. 1.

The district started looking at armed guards before the Sandy Hook shootings when officials attended a training session on school shootings that was offered by the Department of Homeland Security, spokeswoman Nancy Horst said.

From that training, they learned that having guards on site would greatly reduce any response time to a crisis, she said. She said the new security was added with little or no public resistance.

“One of the reasons that this went through fairly quickly and didn’t get a lot of backlash,” she said, “is those men are retired police officers and have been in our community a long time.”