It happened again. Just this week, East High School in Denver was rocked not by victims, thank God, but by the same horrifying pattern that we’ve been warning about for years. A student was found to be carrying a gun in his bag. Another terrified kid spoke up, alerted someone they trusted, and officers from the Colorado Department of Public Safety stepped in. The student resisted, he was handcuffed, and a weapon was discovered inside his belongings. There were no injuries this time, but the fact that the possibility was there should make every parent and every policymaker stop cold.

This is not a stand-alone incident. In March of 2023, East High student Austin Lyle was being frisked when a gun was found. He immediately opened fire, critically injuring two administrators before fleeing and later taking his own life. That same year, another student, Luis Garcia, was shot and killed in his car just outside the school. His family tried to hold the district accountable, only for a judge to dismiss the case because the shooting happened just beyond the edge of school property.

Eighteen months later, what has changed? Nothing. Students are still finding ways to bring guns into schools. Administrators are still facing down death at the hands of their own students. Parents are still left asking how it can be that a school day could end in gunfire. And yet, rather than demanding real change, our leaders are fixated on something else entirely.

Instead of focusing on guns in schools, the U.S. Department of Education has decided that the real battle is over bathrooms. East High has been told by the federal government that it must eliminate gender-neutral restrooms or face the threat of enforcement action. This is not some grassroots uprising from East High families but the result of a complaint filed by a national group with an agenda. Meanwhile, Denver Public Schools has said they will fight the order, pointing out that these facilities were created at the request of LGBTQ+ students who felt unsafe otherwise. Students themselves say they don’t want to be pawns in some culture war; they just want to go to school without worrying about funding cuts or political distractions.

And who is directing this crusade? The Department of Education is now run by Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) executive who was appointed in Trump’s second term. Her stated mission is to dismantle the very department she leads. She remains married, but separated, to Vince McMahon, who is facing allegations in court over sexual abuse that happened under his watch, a case that has been paused but not resolved. As far as the public record shows, they are not divorced. The spectacle is obscene. The woman overseeing the nation’s schools is tied directly to a man accused of looking the other way while his company allegedly harbored predators.

It is enraging to watch. Colorado is the state that birthed modern school shootings. Columbine happened there in 1999, changing the country forever. The Aurora theater shooting followed in 2012, carried out by a former graduate student who turned a midnight movie into a slaughter. The STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting came in 2019, where students themselves tackled the gunmen to prevent greater loss of life. In 2022, the Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs was the site of yet another massacre, this time driven by hate. And in 2019, a young woman named Sol Pais, obsessed with Columbine, flew to Colorado armed and forced schools across the state to close before she took her own life. Every one of these events should have been a warning. Every one of them should have spurred change. Instead, here we are in 2025, and guns are still making their way into the halls of East High School.

The pattern is unmistakable, yet the priorities of those in power are not on stopping the next tragedy. They are on bathrooms. Guns keep slipping past the checkpoints. Students keep dying. Teachers keep bleeding. Families keep grieving. But the federal government seems to believe the most urgent crisis is deciding who can use which restroom.

Our kids deserve better than to be sacrificed to political theater. They deserve leaders who care more about their survival than about scoring points in the culture wars. East High has become a symbol, not just of Colorado’s violent legacy, but of a system that continues to look away from the real threat while fighting over distractions. It is infuriating, and the next time the headlines read that lives have been lost, no one should be surprised.

(Sources)

• Denver officers find gun in East High student’s bag after he was placed in handcuffs, school says
• Student found with gun at East High School
• Denver’s East High School nears deadline to change gender-neutral bathrooms