Posted on 10/14/2006 10:38:08 AM PDT by KarinG1
BURLESON, Texas – Youngsters in a suburban Fort Worth school district are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit him with everything they got – books, pencils, legs and arms.
‘‘Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success,'' said Robin Browne, a major in the British Army reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing the training to the Burleson schools.
That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and some fear it will get children killed.
But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania last week.
The school system in this working-class suburb of about 26,000 is believed to be the first in the nation to train all its teachers and students to fight back, Browne said.
At Burleson – which has 10 schools and about 8,500 students – the training covers various emergencies, such as tornadoes, fires and situations where first aid is required. Among the lessons: Use a belt as a sling for broken bones, and shoelaces make good tourniquets.
Students are also instructed not to comply with a gunman's orders, and to take him down.
Browne recommends students and teachers ‘‘react immediately to the sight of a gun by picking up anything and everything and throwing it at the head and body of the attacker and making as much noise as possible. Go toward him as fast as we can and bring them down.''
Response Options trains students and teachers to ‘‘lock onto the attacker's limbs and use their body weight,'' Browne said. Everyday classroom objects, such as paperbacks and pencils, can become weapons.
‘‘We show them they can win,'' he said. ‘‘The fact that someone walks into a classroom with a gun does not make them a god. Five or six seventh-grade kids and a 95-pound art teacher can basically challenge, bring down and immobilize a 200-pound man with a gun.''
The fight-back training parallels the change in thinking that has occurred since Sept. 11, when United Flight 93 made it clear that the usual advice during a hijacking – Don't try to be a hero, and no one will get hurt – no longer holds. Flight attendants and passengers are now encouraged to rush the cockpit.
Similarly, women and youngsters are often told by safety experts to kick, scream and claw they way out during a rape attempt or a child-snatching.
In 1998 in Oregon, a 17-year-old high school wrestling star with a bullet in his chest stopped a rampage by tackling a teenager who had opened fire in the cafeteria. The gunman killed two students, as well as his parents, and 22 other were wounded.
Hilda Quiroz of the National School Safety Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in California, said she knows of no other school system in the country that is offering fight-back training, and found the strategy at Burleson troubling.
‘‘If kids are saved, then this is the most wonderful thing in the world. If kids are killed, people are going to wonder who's to blame,'' she said. ‘‘How much common sense will a student have in a time of panic?''
Terry Grisham, spokesman for the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department, said he, too, had concerns, though he had not seen details of the program.
‘‘You're telling kids to do what a tactical officer is trained to do, and they have a lot of guns and ballistic shields,'' he said. ‘‘If my school was teaching that, I'd be upset, frankly.''
Some students said they appreciate the training.
‘‘It's harder to hit a moving target than a target that is standing still,'' said 14-year-old Jessica Justice, who received the training over the summer during freshman orientation at Burleson High.
William Lassiter, manager of the North Carolina-based Center for Prevention of School Violence, said past attacks indicate that fighting back, at least by teachers and staff, has its merits.
‘‘At Columbine, teachers told students to get down and get on the floors, and gunmen went around and shot people on the floors,'' Lassiter said. ‘‘I know this sounds chaotic and I know it doesn't sound like a great solution, but it's better than leaving them there to get shot.''
Lassiter questioned, however, whether students should be included in the fight-back training: ‘‘That's going to scare the you-know-what out of them.''
Perhaps it is just a difference in backgrounds and community experiences? I live in a community where virtually every household I've visited has a gun cabinet and housewives routinely keep a pistol in their purse or glove compartment when they are out and about.
Most people I meet have well-developed "neighborly" reflexes. For example, the couple of times I've experienced a vehicle breakdown since moving here about 8 years ago, ten minutes didn't go by before someone stopped to ask if I needed help. My armed neighbors give me a sense of well-being rather than alarm. It's people in the state and nation who want to disarm their fellow citizens that make me nervous. If they can't trust their neighbors to be armed, what delusory reasoning leads them to imagine that they can trust "the authorities"?
Where I work, and at most if not all government buildings in the area, especially schools, there is a sign on the entrance that bars armed visitors or occupants, as is required by the state "concealed carry" law for establishments whose managers want to exclude armed visitors. While I think that building owners have a right to post such signs and enforce them, I think they are unwise to do so for precisely the reason WildBill noted.
I hope this idea of active response to intruders spreads to our area's "managing class", and we get less focus on weapons bans on normal visitors to buildings and more on reasonable preparations for repelling hostile intruders. Those "weapons banned" signs are magnets for trouble.
"Some" fear every damn thing, but sitting quietly by didn't work so very well for the kids in Pennsylvania, nor in Columbine, now did it?
The only reason some armed sicko would go to a school is to kill kids, and "some" think defending themselves could make things worse?
"Some" seem to have been shorted when they were handing out good sense...
But teaching them to lie there and die quietly is just idiotic, just plain dam idiotic.
If that's what you'd do, I feel sorry for you.
My son is only 9, but he knows better than that.
I missed the part where I said that. To teach a kid to throw a book at someone armed with a gun is, to use your term, idiotic. When faced with someone armed with a firearm and all you have is a pencil, you have two choices. Flight, if you can create distance and obstacles between you or fight, if you have no choice. In the fight scenario, they should be taught to attack in force and use those pencils to jam through the eyes. I've taken steps to see that my kids know how to defend themselves in the worst possible situations. No need to feel sorry for any of us.
Well our Schools in Burleson have backed off this now, even though they had 85% support among parents..the other 15% got their way.
Im so fed up with minority rule.
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