Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar visited Montezuma-Cortez High School on Monday as part of a statewide tour to discuss violence in schools and to promote his Safe Communities-Safe Schools program.

During the hour-long discussion period, which included comments from a large panel of students from Dolores, Mancos and Cortez, Salazar gave the students the opportunity to tell him exactly how local students feel about school safety.

"We just tell them what they want to hear," said one unidentified student at the completion of the forum. "They don’t want to hear the truth."

Sarah Decker, an 18-year-old senior at MCHS, also felt let down by the open forum.

"I don’t think that it was really helpful," said Decker. "There is just a lot of talk and not much action."

"I think that people need to go out and talk to the individual students," said the senior. "When you herd people into the auditorium like a bunch of sheep to talk to them, then they go out of it thinking that it was just a waste of time."

The discussion, led by Salazar, focused on topics ranging from self-esteem, family relationships, school bullying and peer intervention to items such as gun laws and the role of the media and entertainment.

Several students on the panel agreed that many of the problems stem from home and are the result of poor parenting.

"A lot of people think that they aren’t worth much," said panel member Daniel Puls. "They walk around with their heads down with the fear of not being accepted by their peers and afraid to be themselves."

The way to fix low self-esteem, agreed many students, is for parents to allow their kids to make mistakes without degrading them.

Puls said that the school day can be pretty taxing for a student, but then to go home and get bashed again by a parent doesn’t help.

When the discussion turned to gun control and gun safety, nearly everyone in the audience admitted to having shot a firearm at least once in their life. One student panel member stated that guns were not the problem, but that a gun was merely a tool and that nearly anything man created could be used for killing. Other panel members felt that a gun safety course should be required before anyone should be allowed to obtain a firearm.

Jessica Squires, an MCHS junior and audience member, openly lambasted the government for attempting to pass a number of gun laws following the Columbine tragedy.

"Gun laws wouldn’t have helped stop Columbine at all," said Squires. "Its just a bunch of people making laws trying to cover their own butts."

Following the student discussion, Del Elliott, a violence expert from the Violence Prevention Center at the University of Colorado, discussed several recent statistics with the students in order to clarify many popular assumptions.

Contrary to popular belief, said Elliott, there aren’t any more violent acts today than there were 10 years ago.

"What has changed, however, is the lethality," Elliott said. "Today there are more injuries and more deaths as the result of violent acts."

"In the last 10 years, the homicide rate has more than doubled — and it is because of guns," Elliott said.

Elliott cited a recent survey which stated that 6 percent of all students across the United States have brought a gun to school in the last 30 days.

"This was unheard of when I was going to school," he said.

In order to fix some of these violence problems, Elliot suggested that schools should have few rules but the ones they do have should be strictly and uniformly enforced.

"Being a great athlete or a straight ‘A’ student should not influence the enforcement of the school’s rules," he said.

Elliott also mentioned that schools should start implementing safety programs such as a tip hotline or a Safe School Planning Team made up of students, teachers, law enforcement representatives, parents and people from the faith community.

"This is a community problem, so the entire community should be represented," Elliott said.

In closing, Elliott encouraged the audience to stop buying into the violence in movies and on TV.