TRAINING SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICERS TO TAKE ON ACTIVE SHOOTERS

I think we all can agree that our children are our most precious commodity in this world; literally, there is nothing on this planet with as much beauty and world-changing potential as a human child. Yet, the legislative body of the United States government seems to be at a standstill to begin making sweeping changes to prevent something like a Uvalde or Sandy Hook from happening ever again. Well, I submit to you that nothing short of the most heinous and horrendous destruction of scores of our most precious resource (our children), would even begin to move the dial for that pathetic and lost body of government.

Therefore as always, the solution must come from the people. In particular, the people who understand the tactics, techniques, and methodology of killers well enough to detect, hunt down and neutralize them where they stand. Nowadays, waiting for the police to arrive is too late, and I mean in general, outside of the clown show put on by the Uvalde Texas police, the response time between life and death during an active shooting of even competent police officers, is often too long. We believe it is necessary to have a reasonable internal solution.

I say reasonable because we are seeing school systems allow for school teachers to be trained to respond with a handgun during an active shooting. On the "knee-jerk", surface, that may seem like a reasonable solution, but anyone that has any degree of real law enforcement/combat/COMMON SENSE should be able to see that having a school teacher go from explaining fractions to shooting some crazed kid with an AR15 in his head, is more unlikely than a group of scared and determined individuals grabbing the barrel of his rifle. Not that the whole "RUN, HIDE, FIGHT" strategy is any better mind you, putting the burden of disarming, neutralizing (i.e. killing the bastard), or any high-functioning motor skills that require years of training is just stupid. Not to mention the multitude of horrible collateral possibilities of the teacher/gunslinger solution.

Thus we come to a reasonable solution in Training School Resource Officers (SROs are typically unarmed security personnel within some school systems, who "keep the peace" ) to respond to crisis events, with abbreviated skills in Close Quarters Battle, extensive training in Emergency Evacuation, Tactical Communications, and Surveillance Detection. There would only be the need for at minimum a 2-man team and an excellent communication protocol in place. Also, realistically adding in the ability to monitor the parking lot areas nearest open entryways would be helpful too. However, the key to success in providing this high-level of force protection for a school will be the preparation before anything could occur.

It would be important for a detailed Threat Vulnerability Assessement (TVA) to take place, in which the assessors will look at the current Active Shooter policies and procedures of the school and help to improve them if needed; or ensure that the SRO's are "read-in" and properly placed within the current plan. A good TVA in this area of operation should also aid in mapping the hallways, and create communication shortcuts that are known by the responders, the SRO's and leadership to quickly identify the location of students and the shooter if necessary. Additional preparation would be to liaison with local law enforcement to ensure that they are familiar with the trained SROs at the school and know that they are armed and for each party to be highly familiar with each other's protocols so there are no "friendly-fire" incidents.

There is no perfect answer to solving this random destruction of innocent lives, however, if we take a second to think through viable solutions, I am sure we can come up with the best possible answers to a really bad scenario.