Since when does a man riding a bicycle, minding his own business, absent any other facts, justify locking down a school to the mind of any sensible person?
The Sentinel’s story suffers from a conspicuous absence of specific facts relevant to controlling law.
Officer Stassen’s statement, “people can potentially be cited for openly carrying firearms in a manner that causes alarm in a public place” completely ignores the Culture-War-related propaganda fact that to certain touchy-feely liberal constitutional illiterates, merely openly carrying a gun in full compliance with their legal rights, in and of itself, “causes alarm”. That phenomenon completely ignores the obvious legal fact that the disorderly conduct statute was never intended to negate, or even effectively diminish in any way, the concealed carry statute.
The problem is that an innocent person could be falsely charged with disorderly conduct, forcing them to spend money on a lawyer and be significantly inconvenienced by a court appearance.
Since both the Sentinel and officer Stassen may be presumed to have a working understanding of Colorado law, the Sentinel’s story seems deliberately designed to create doubt in the minds of Sentinel readers as to their legal rights under both state and federal constitutions.
So goes the Culture War between a liberal newspaper of record and citizens desirous of self-ownership and holding government inside the bounds of state and federal constitutions.
Sheep panic. Sensible people deal with their fears, they don’t try to exaggerate and politicize them.

Since others have yet to respond, I decided there was room for a brief addendum. I take issue with the accuracy of the story’s first sentence. The fair inference of the grammar is that the bicyclist “caused” the lockdown. I beg to differ. Absent other facts, the bicyclist in question was in full compliance with his legal rights and was minding his own business, and “caused” nothing. The cause of the lockdown was the hasty and poorly thought out judgment of school officials relying on the hearsay testimony of one student in the context of the situation.
I realize, of course, that their political propaganda talking point would be “better safe than sorry” where children are involved. (And we all know what a clever and effective political talking point “for the children” is, especially when it comes to fiscal matters.)
Everybody wants all children to be safe. And everyone but wannabe-clever sophistic partisan propagandists know that full well. It’s just that children are not going to be any safer — in fact they will be less safe — if they are raised in a “Papers please!” police-state atmosphere of fear of the politically-created bogeyman of terrorism than in an atmosphere of due respect for self-ownership, Golden-Rule morality, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and state and federal constitutions.