Thanks for the bump. I agree that this column written two years ago by our local county sheriff is valuable considering recent events. I'm re-pinging it to the original commenters, some fellow Freepers (along with Onyx who might just like my “girls with guns” comments at the end of this post).
BTW, our sheriff who wrote this article back in 2010 is retiring, but as one of his actions during his last few months in office, he was able to obtain a grant to bring LTC Dave Grossman to the Fort Leonard Wood area next year to provide active shooter training for school incidents and related nightmares to several hundred civilian law enforcement personnel and MPs. The new sheriff (a retired police officer who served in several suburban counties in Texas but whose hometown is here and moved back here a few years ago after he retired) is just as committed to this kind of training.
For those who want to know more about LTC Grossman, click here:
http://www.killology.com/bio.htm
For Secret Agent Man, our sheriff also organized church shooter response training so church boards and pastors know how to plan in advance to defend their congregations if needed. Not only schools but also churches are a realistic target for a Muslim terror attack. My own church has had several people carrying concealed weapons for many years, not because they've been asked to do it, but because they're combat veterans who know what Islamic radicals are capable of doing and want to be prepared, but organizing a church response plan is a lot better than having a couple of people pull out their concealed weapons for a disorganized response by multiple individuals to an organized group attack.
We are kidding ourselves if we think it couldn't happen here. In fact, our community, and a lot of other military towns, could be a realistic place for an attack like Beslan. Targeting the teenage children of military personnel would, unfortunately, be seen as a legitimate act of war in some parts of the Muslim world. The boys may be considered to be military-age sons of “infidel” warriors, and the girls may be considered young “infidel” women old enough to rape.
Recognizing that possibility (and recognizing that terrorists Google), I see no good reason not to point out that the main school district in our area has well-organized plans in place to respond to a school shooting incident, and they involve lots of local police who are former military personnel, unpaid reserve police whose full-time jobs at Fort Leonard Wood include conducting training for some of the nastiest things our troops have to deal with in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some well-trained SWAT teams composed of both full-time and reserve officers. Of course, the resources of a major Army installation are located just minutes away should they be needed in case of an actual attack, with enough full-time National Guard specialized personnel to fulfill the niceties of posse comitatus if the terrorist attack isn't too large.
Because of that, the local assumption, probably a correct assumption, is that terrorists would regard our main school district as a hardened target and would plan an attack elsewhere in the more rural areas where lots of military personnel and retirees live, but which have a much smaller police presence. I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been discussed openly in public meetings, and it's a valid issue.
That's where school shooter training like what LTC Grossman is providing can be especially helpful for small departments that don't have the funding to field a SWAT team. The ability to bring trained shooter response teams into an incident is important because it reduces casualties and deters planned attacks by hardening the target, but sometimes finances mean it simply isn't possible.
Offering that type of training to sergeants and police chiefs in small rural departments can be especially important since having “train the trainer” practices in place may be critical in preparing local police to know what's necessary during the time it takes for backup to arrive. No policeman in a town of 1,500 wants to sit helplessly outside his town's school as the only officer on duty while he hears a dozen terrorists shooting, killing, and raping his neighbors inside.
I have no illusions about how many people would die in a well-planned terrorist attack on a rural Southern school district near a military installation. In towns with only a few uniformed police available for an immediate response, the initial attack will be deadly and there won't be enough people wearing uniforms to stop it at first. It would not be pretty and lots of kids and teachers would die.
However, they won't be the only ones to die.
Let's just say if something like that ever does happen, some Islamic radicals may find out the hard way that Ozark hillbillies are almost born knowing how to shoot. Also, unlike what happened at Beslan where lots of cute young schoolteachers were considered by the terrorists to be good rape victims, around here, that cute twenty-something teacher is quite likely to be either an Army wife who is perfectly capable of using the handgun in her purse or a native Ozarkian who learned to shoot and hunt while growing up with dad and her brothers.
Especially in the more rural school districts around Fort Leonard Wood where it could take significant time for sheriff's deputies and backup police living in other towns to respond, the terrorists might be lucky if the law enforcement personnel arrive in time to protect them from a lynching.
Let's not underestimate the power of armed citizenry to respond when the police aren't yet there, or when the police have been shot as some of the first casualties in a well-planned attack. Muslim terrorists haven't yet attacked many Southern or rural targets in America, and there may be good reasons for that. Disarmed people make helpless targets, and there aren't a lot of disarmed people in the South or other parts of rural America.
My only problem with NRA official Wayne LaPierre’s now famous statement that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is that some of those “guys” are female. That's especially true in schools where many and sometimes most of the staff are female. Islamic radicals seem to have a hard time understanding that just because someone wears high heels and a skirt doesn't mean they can't shoot back.
The last thing I want is to see a terrorist attack on a school on American soil, but if, God forbid, something like that does happen, I wouldn't mind at all seeing a 5'1” teacher go on the national news explaining how her years of deer hunting with dad equipped her to conceal herself and move quickly from room to room shooting the subhuman animals in the head who were trying to kill her kids.
Nobody with brain wants to be in a situation like that, but we need to start educating the American mainstream that having lots of guns in a community is a great deterrent which should be encouraged, not a danger to be feared.
Also, we need to work harder at explaining to people who support women's rights that one of the best ways for women to reduce the inherent imbalance in physical power between men and women is for the woman to be well-trained in how to shoot an attacker. A gun makes a great equalizer in gender relations, and I think a fair number of people who don't consider themselves to be conservatives on other issues can be brought around to understand the benefits of promoting gun ownership by women.
