On April 20, 1999, Ken Fox, then a county commissioner, was attending a meeting in Washington, D.C.
It was the day two teenage boys walked into Columbine High School in Littleton taking the lives of 13 students, and wounding more than 20 before turning guns on themselves.
It was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history, and Fox, who currently serves on the Board of Education for the Archuleta School District (ASD), remembers it vividly.
In 2006, a shooter killed a student and himself after taking six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo. In 2012, a gunman killed 12 in a movie theater in Aurora.
Each horrific incident left a lasting mark on Fox, but none like the Sandy Hook shooting in 2014, when 20 elementary school children and six adults were killed in Newtown, Conn.
It was a tragedy that brought the country to a standstill, but, for Fox, who had been advocating for better school security several years prior, it fueled his mission of protecting Pagosa schools.
According to Fox, the one thing these shootings, and many more, have in common is the fact that each location was a gun-free zone.
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