Last week I attended a seminar on school violence and active killers presented by the Public Safety Training Institute. In attendance were perhaps 70 educators and school administrators from around the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as about a dozen police officers (most of them SROs, I believe).
This excellent four-hour presentation — delivered by Lieutenant Anthony Duckworth of the Fremont (Calif.) Police Department — contained countless nuggets of information useful to LEOs, but the primary audience here was the school teacher who may one day face targeted violence all by themselves while officers race (responsibly) to the scene.
One of the many topics Duckworth covered was the “fight” piece of run-hide-fight. As you might imagine, in a room full of teachers you don’t have a room full of fighters. In fact, fighting is anathema in just about every classroom in America.
When the session was done, I got into a discussion with a few of the attendees about the use improvised and/or environmental weapons, and began to channel my inner Gary Klugiewicz.
I grabbed the back of a nearby chair, swung it up in a fighting stance, and said, “Why do lion tamers do this? Because it works, that’s why.”
Is a chair all that effective against a gunman?
No. Of course not.
A gun — in the hands of a properly-trained, properly-vetted Sheepdog — is effective against a gunman.
But if you have the opportunity to do so, I encourage you to share this little tidbit with the school teachers in your area of responsibility. It can serve as the beginning of a much larger conversation about hardening the classroom against targeted violence.
Once that discussion has begun, direct those who are interested to this column, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one as well.
Check out the video from Gary. Stay safe out there my friends.
