Phoenix – Former Congressman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Salmon issued the following video statement about the tragedy that unfolded in Uvalde, Texas.

In the video, Salmon outlines steps that Arizona needs to take in order to protect our young people, including a volunteer training program to provide for an armed and unarmed immediate response to emergency situations. The Arizona Citizens Defense League (AzCDL) Foundation plans to bring one such program, called 'FASTER,' to our state.

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You can read Salmon's spoken remarks below:

"I was very brokenhearted when I heard the news about what happened to these beautiful children in Uvalde, Texas.

"It was a despicable crime, and it had an even greater poignance to me because Uvalde is a place that I've been visiting for the last ten years. I have a dear friend that has a ranch there, and I've been visiting him every December and so it really hit me hard.

"We've got to do more to make sure that our kids are safe. It should be priority one in the state of Arizona, and that's why I'm announcing today that I want to partner with a program out of Ohio called FASTER [Faculty & Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response].

"This program teaches our teachers how to be tactical. It teaches them first aid training and also what to do in a situation like this. I think this is incredibly important and it will be a very rigorous program where teachers must volunteer to do it and they must actually pass testing to be able to receive the certification, and then they will be able to bring guns to school to protect the children.

"There will be very, very select people that do this, but this is something I'm suggesting in addition to the School Resource Officers that I believe every school needs to have. We've got to make safety of our children paramount. We did this with the pilots after 9/11 and it's been very, very successful. And, again, it will be with just those teachers that volunteer. It's time that we solve this problem."