Courtesy of Michael Kenneth Beyries

Michael Kenneth Beyries sits with his dog, Lily, whose company he will enjoy during his 6-month house arrest.

Former Santa Rosa Junior College communications instructor Michael “Ken” Beyries apologized for disrupting his students’ education when he brought a loaded Colt .380 caliber ACP semiautomatic pistol into Garcia Hall, in a telephone interview Saturday from his home where he will spend the next six months under house arrest.

Beyries was sentenced April 19 to 180 days house arrest followed by two years probation after he plead no contest to one felony count of possessing a firearm on a college campus. He expressed regret for his mistake and for what happened to the students he was teaching that semester.

“I made a mistake, there’s no question about it,” he said. “It’s something you have to live with.” At age 75, he recognizes when people make mistakes, they must accept the consequences and deal with them the best they can, he said.

“In retrospect, I’m glad no greater harm came to anyone except myself,” he said.

Beyries’ colleagues are equally glad to close the issue and move on. “We’re really lucky nothing bad happened, and I’m glad that [Beyries] is taking responsibility for his actions,” said Elizabeth Simas, communication studies department chair.

“I can’t even begin to imagine how it makes our students feel [to have an instructor arrested for possessing a firearm on campus]. It made the department feel violated to know one of our peers had been hiding [the gun] for an unknown amount of time, and incredulous to know that he was willing to put students in danger by having it on him while with them,” Simas said in a subsequent text.

Simas described the stress of needing to find substitutes for Beyries’ classes to ensure students receive credit for their classes which, by November, they’d nearly completed. She recognizes that “[her] stress was only a fraction of what [Beyries’] students were likely having,” she said. After the arrest, she asked Student Psychological Services to meet with each class to help students process their emotions about the arrest.

The communications studies faculty and staff also acknowledge the three decades that Beyries contributed and the sorrow many feel about the way his service ended.

On Nov. 8, 2023, Beyries sent students to his office to get his inhaler from his briefcase after suffering a coughing fit during class. The students found the semiautomatic pistol and notified an instructor, who notified the SRJC district police on Nov. 16, 2023.

Subsequently, on Nov. 20, 2023, SRJC district police searched Beyries and detained him after finding the gun. In addition to the felony gun possession on campus, Sonoma’s District Attorney initially charged Beyries with three other felony counts: having a gun without being the registered owner, having a concealed and loaded gun in a car, and having a loaded gun in a public space.

After his arrest, Beyries was held on $60,000 bail. He resigned from his SRJC associate instructor position.

At his March 5, 2024 court hearing, Beyries pled no contest to felony gun possession, and the prosecutor dropped the other three charges. Beyries received his sentence of 180-days house arrest followed by two years formal probation on April 18, 2024.

Beyries explained that he decided to carry a concealed and loaded gun after the Uvalde school shooting on May 24, 2022 when an 18-year-old fatally shot 19 students and injured 17 others.

“All my life I tried to be prepared for things,” Beyries said. He described seeing a student fall from his bike on the SRJC campus and gash his scalp six years ago, an incident that led Beyries to always carry a first aid kit in his car. He witnessed another incident with his daughter, who helped a convulsing person with Narcan that she had in her bag. Since then, Beyries kept Narcan in his briefcase.

The decision to carry a gun wasn’t the result of “soul searching, or an epiphany, or spiritual awakening . . . It simply appeared at the time [to him] to be the correct thing to do,” he said. It was an act that made him feel that he was “elevating the potential for safety.”

A long-time gun owner and former competitive shooter, Beyries knows gun safety protocols. He ensured that both of his daughters took safety courses and learned how to handle and secure firearms. Before his arrest, he kept his seven guns in a locked gun safe in his home. Beyries emphasized that he no longer possesses guns, as a requirement of his home arrest and probation.

Unlike Beyries’ daughters, most SRJC students likely did not receive gun safety training.

He also knows gun-fatality facts. “You are more likely in California to be killed by lightning than by a school shooting,” Beyries said. “But you are more likely to be killed accidentally than deliberately by a firearm.”

According to the Bloomberg School of Public Health, four decades of research provide “overwhelming evidence show[ing] that firearm ownership and access is associated with increased suicide, homicide, unintentional firearm deaths, and injuries.” In 2021, firearms killed 48,830 Americans — about one every 11 minutes, according to a Bloomberg report.

When asked about the risk of having a loaded and concealed gun on campus, Beyries said, “The only harm that could take place is exactly what did take place: That the gun would be discovered by a student.”

Beyries, who has a law degree and taught logic and critical thinking, acknowledged the cognitive dissonance between his knowledge about gun safety protocols and gun fatalities, on the one hand and, on the other, his belief that carrying a loaded and concealed gun on campus would protect himself and others from a potential school shooter. His belief system overrode his knowledge, he conceded.

“In retrospect, the risk exceeded any utility that a gun might have provided,” he said. “In retrospect, the gun never should have been on campus.”

Having finished with the court proceedings, Beyries described himself as “recovering.” A former attorney, he knows well the arraignment and sentencing formalities, which he found “very trying for someone his age.”

He lives on a remote 12.5-acre ranch where he will complete the 180-day house arrest. His probation report allows for him to go to doctors’ appointments for his various medical issues and allots four hours each week to go to the feed store, Costco and Walmart to pick up necessities for himself, his four cats and three goats.

Beyries, who once raised snails, will have the company of his dog, Lily, cats Conan, Thumbelina, Handsome Jack and Atticus, and his goats, Mama, Baby and Shy, during his home confinement. He has about a half-acre of grapes, which he calls his “vanity vineyard,” and will grow tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers and garlic over the summer.

He’ll have plenty of time to reflect on his life and his career, as well as the political stance of America in the world today, he said.

Beyries was wistful about the transformation of what he’d planned for retirement — riding from Canada to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains by motorcycle with his Australian shepherd, Lily, in a sidecar. But he recognizes the gravity of his mistake and stated that he understood the consequences of his actions.