speaker-0 (00:04)
of the Forge of Freedom podcast. I'm your host, Alex Gouley, and today I'm happy to be joined by a special guest, a repeat guest, ⁓ Ed Monk. Ed Monk has, of course, the last resort firearms training in Arkansas. He's also the author of a book called First 30 Seconds, which we're here to talk about today. ⁓ Ed, we're here at the NRA annual meeting in Houston, and you're actually one of the ⁓ educational presenters. You ⁓ have three seminars this weekend, right? You mind to tell us just a little bit about that before we get into your book?

speaker-1 (00:30)
22

Well sure, the one I'm doing, I'm doing one class each day and NRA kind of got them out of order. The one that's shooting first is the one I'm doing Sunday and that's just a look at the active shooter problem, the history of it, how as a country we've not been doing well at it, all the mistakes we're making, ⁓ the fact that math is the most important thing and what we can do to be better. That's what I'm doing Sunday. So that presentation ends with...

Everybody when an attack happens has three options. Fight, flee and barricade and that's the order they should be considered in. Fight first, if not then flee and then only barricade is the last resort. what I'm doing, what I did today and doing tomorrow is a presentation for, okay, everybody has three choices, fight, flee, barricade, specifically for those of us who carry pistols in public. And we've already predetermined we will or we will likely fight. What are some considerations for armed people fighting an active shooter?

So we talk about who we're going to fight, the environment we're going to fight them in. We talk a little bit about gear choice, about accuracy, importance, and other things. But it's specifically for armed people. that's what yesterday I'm going to do tomorrow.

speaker-0 (01:43)
Excellent. ⁓ You've already given one, as you just said, you've done a seminar today, you've got one tomorrow and Sunday. ⁓ And that's about an hour of seminar.

speaker-1 (01:53)
Yeah, they've scheduled me for an hour. Both of those are three to four hour presentations, but I've crunched them down and summarized them for the time.

speaker-0 (02:01)
Okay, excellent. Well, for those who aren't familiar with you, actually, if you don't mind just give the listeners a little bit of background about who you are, how you came to the active shooter problem, and why you sort of decided to take on ⁓ that topic as one to help address.

speaker-1 (02:20)
Sure. I grew up in Arkansas, left after high school to join the military, went to the military academy for four years and then did 20 years as an armor officer in the army. So tanks and cavalry were the units I was in and if you don't know, the leaders in armor and infantry pretty much, our job is to plan to execute violence, horrible, deadly violence against other people.

while we expect the people were fighting trying to do violence against us. So planning for war gaming, analyzing violent action is what we do. And I did that for 20 years and then 10 days after I retired in 2007, 10 days after I retired from the army, I started teaching public high school. And a very wonderful, high, very high performing public high school. And so I had a cultural whiplash of leaving the army and coming into public education where I was told,

We never talk about violence. We don't want to consider violence. We darn sure don't want to do violence or plan for violence. So they told me, well all the teachers, I was there, our policy is if we have an active shooter, your job as the teacher is to gather all your kids in a tight group and have them in the corner of the room. So that when the shooter comes in, you've made his job as easy as you possibly could have made it. They didn't add that last part, but that's what I'm hearing. Because the dumbest private in the Army.

knows if someone's coming to shoot you, you don't gather your people up in a group because you're easily shot and you spread out. So that's what got me into studying this because I was looking at these good, very intelligent, good-meaning people with PhDs and master's degrees, been in education for decades. I just started three days ago and what they're telling me makes no sense to me. So my first thought is there's got to be something about this I'm not understanding.

Because all these people with all these credentials and all this experience are telling me that would be like I'm from the south, I'm from Arkansas if an expert told me if a tornado comes get on the roof. Well I'm not a meteorologist but my time in Arkansas tells me that's not only a good thing, that's a bad thing. So but then studying it I found out no they didn't know anything I didn't know. They just had no experience with violence, had no stomach for violence. So anything that's needed that we don't want to personally do we try to outsource it.

My car's oil needs changed from time to time. If I don't want to get my hands all messy, I go to quickie loo. If I don't want to cut my grass because my ankles get all covered with grass clippings and I get sweaty and hot, then I pay some guy to come cut my grass. The schools don't want to deal with violence, so they say we have the cops, we'll let them handle it. And the cops will handle it. You're just not going to like the number of victims you have by the time they get notified and they get there and they handle it.

So that's what got me into studying this and trying to talk to anybody who would listen, but it's mostly been schools, churches, and law enforcement to tell them what we're doing, relying on the 911 system, will not give us a low victim count.

speaker-0 (05:10)
And when was this, when did you start as a team? So that's number of years after the Columbine shooting and ends.

speaker-1 (05:13)
2007, summer of 2000.

Columbine is a big benchmark. made, you know, was a, and I don't really know why, but it got huge media coverage, but that was 1999 and we had many school shootings in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s before Columbine. And we had a multiple student shooting in my home state of Arkansas in Jonesboro and that didn't make the news like Columbine. So, we had three decades of school shootings when I started teaching at the school.

speaker-0 (05:37)
Yeah, so it certainly wasn't the first of its

Right. Yeah,

but for whatever reason like you say Columbine got a lot of attention and there's certainly no reason that a school by 2007 should not have been aware of this

speaker-1 (05:54)
great, no they knew about it. They just didn't want to deal with it so it's let the cops come.

speaker-0 (05:58)
Yeah,

so you as a new teacher were approaching the the topic with some humility thinking maybe these people know something that I don't

speaker-1 (06:05)
had to because this is what this makes no sense again this would be like they if they just said okay you know what we do here if we have a tornado drill we all get on the roof of the building yeah tornadoes and you know I've taught in Kentucky tornadoes in Kentucky must be quite different than the ones I'm used to in Arkansas that's why that's why I got into it and then the fact that ⁓ everybody and you know was so wrong was so ill-informed and regardless of 30 years of this you know if the first active shooter happened today

speaker-0 (06:13)
Yeah, boy.

speaker-1 (06:32)
and we messed up the response, you could forgive it. You could understand it. You know, we weren't ready for this. It's never happened. But at that time, we had three decades of it. We knew exactly what the threat was and that schools were one of the primary targets. And still, they refused to look at it realistically.

speaker-0 (06:47)
So you really in earnest started looking at this topic in 2007. But you brought a lot of experience to bear with that. had the military experience, your experience as a law enforcement officer, and then now as a teacher. When you realized what the schools were saying didn't make any sense, how did you start? Did you go back and study old shootings? Were you looking at archives?

speaker-1 (07:12)
No, just Google and look at past shootings. yeah, just, you know, like, well, what they're saying would have made it worse. And all of the ones I'm researching, what they're telling kids, me to tell the kids to do, would benefit the shooter and cause a lot of people to be shot in every case. It makes no sense, because they weren't factoring in time.

speaker-0 (07:35)
getting your information. You say Google, was ⁓ there a commission after Parkland? What sort of data was available for you to look at when you started looking at this topic?

speaker-1 (07:46)
Well if you just Google, take any Parkland Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, you Google it, you'll get 30 different articles. Just read them all. most of the things, it'll say it in all of them, so you figure that's probably pretty accurate. And then the longer I went, I started going to conferences.

And you met the heroes that were there that interdicted and stopped. met victims that were shot, that were there, that witnessed it. And so you got to see first-person ⁓ witnesses that would help and then books that you could read about them and all that stuff together. And I continue to do that. Every once in while I'll find a shooting I never heard of before, you know, in 1982, that somebody will tell me about and I'll go research it and sure enough they're

speaker-0 (08:29)
So you went from researching this topic, reading about it, when did you start talking about it?

speaker-1 (08:36)
Well, almost right away, when I, shortly after I did a little bit of research, I asked to speak to the Innocents, this is in the book, by the way, my assistant principal in charge of security, and not a bad guy, not a dumb guy, great guy. I played basketball with him after school, you know, but, and so I just said, ask, could I talk to you at your free time? Now, when they're telling me that, I thought it was the horribly wrong thing to do, but I'm the new teacher, so you don't speak up as the new guy.

And I just said, you know, when you have 10 minutes, can I talk to you? And I made a very short little PowerPoint and say, listen, here are shootings, here's what's going on, do you see the problem here? And I said, instead of holding my kids in my classroom, waiting to see if the shooter comes and shoots my kids versus going down another wing of the school and we luck out, why don't I have my kids run out of the building? Why would we intentionally stay in a building with a guy we knew was trying to kill us if we could get out? And I got told no, because

we would lose accountability of the kids. It would take hours to find them. Accountability was in their head. That's important to educators. One of the quickest ways to get fired as teachers, lose accountability of your kids. So they're thinking of peacetime, quiet, school days, accountability is important. When people are shooting at them, accountability is not the issue. they had no experience dealing with violence. They couldn't think of And then when I said, well, if you're going to make me stay in the room, which I wouldn't have actually done if we'd had an attack.

If the policy is we stay in the room instead of all bunching up in the corner so we're so easy to shoot in a short amount of time, why don't we have a welcoming party for him? Why don't we fight back? I teach 11th graders mostly at the time, so I got linebackers, I got big guys in my room. Me on one side of the door, two of my bigger male students on the other side of the door, and when he tries to come into that door we just have a welcoming party. I got to know.

We cannot have a policy that we fight the active shooter because our insurance will go up. money, budgeting at a school is a big deal. And so that's what they were thinking because that's what they were used to.

speaker-0 (10:31)
So rather than minimizing casualties, and we'll get into this in a minute, the time and math equation, The priority is...

speaker-1 (10:37)
that they were

for violence and if you're gonna get in combat tomorrow

We don't say, I hope none of us get hurt. Some of us are going to get hurt. So the art is to figure out a way that the very minimum amount of people get hurt. To minimize it. you war game and you, ⁓ that's the art of it. You figure out not the best plan, but the least bad plan. Because some of us are going to get hurt. And they don't know how to do that. They just know we don't want to be violent. So we will hunker down and try not to be shot until the people who do our violence for us, the cops, show up and take care of us.

speaker-0 (11:14)
So you talk privately with the administrators there in the school. When did you start talking about this topic publicly?

speaker-1 (11:22)
I'm going to guess about a year after that as I talk to a school and then talk to another school and then by the way a church and then I started talking to groups you know someone would sponsor me to talk to several and then I started going to conferences and it just kind of grew from there.

speaker-0 (11:37)
there.

Yeah, so you've been doing this almost 20 years now. Almost. Yeah. Almost. And then you've now you're obviously you've got the training business. Yeah. In Arkansas last resort firearms training. Yeah. Where you actually do firearms training but you also travel the country giving seminars on the active shooter.

speaker-1 (11:41)
Yeah.

Because about the time I got interested in studying the active shooter, that's about the time I also put on my training wheels to be a brand new firearms instructor at a very low level. So those things have kind of gone together. So now we still do normal gun stuff. My brother does long range rifle, which I don't do, but I do handgun training specifically to counter the active shooter.

We just did an active shooter instructor class on that last weekend. We'll do it the weekend after I get back. We'll do another one. So that we do that to open enrollment armed citizens. We do it to armed school staff. We do it to armed church security teams and we do it for cops and private security.

speaker-0 (12:30)
So you've been at this for nearly 20 years and all the information you've gathered, all the seminars you've taught has sort of culminated in your book, The First 30 Seconds. Can you tell listeners a little bit about your book, the impetus behind writing that and what your goal is with that book?

speaker-1 (12:50)
funny you should ask because as I kept getting on with the longer it went the more more and it really it really for me I've been doing it since then but it really exploded after the of all the actually about it now why that did I don't know but after the of all the shooting my phone was ringing off the hook my text my emails requesting me to come train a school of church law enforcement or a conference for both

So some of the people, and I'm looking at the back of one of them right now, who saw me at several conferences doing my presentations, him and a few others started asking, when are you going to write the book? And every time they'd see me, that when are going to write Well, I'm a procrastinator. And so it paid off for me, because when I thought I needed to write the book,

speaker-0 (13:24)
Yeah

speaker-1 (13:33)
Had I written it then, would not have been, I think, as good as it is now. It had been full of a bunch of interesting information, but I had not connected the dots. A lot of the dots that I ended up connecting as I was kicking the can down the road, procrastinating about writing the book. So writing the book was very easy for me because what's in the book, I say two to five times a month now as I go across the country doing these presentations.

They talk about the writer's blank page and that wasn't a problem for me. I already knew it had to go in it. The biggest challenge, well two, one, finding some time where I wasn't traveling that I could actually sit down and do it. So I did it over the Christmas kind of December, January when I was home most of the time. And then deciding what not to put in it. Because I didn't want it to be a 600 page book full of, again, of useful or interesting information, just not useful.

So I wanted to keep it at about 200 pages, small, readable, big print that you don't have to squint in. And so that's why I finally did it. Because I wanted to get it out there. Because I talk to a lot of people, but I can't reach as many people as the book can reach. And I wanted to make a document of it to record it down so there's something always out there to say, hey, we're screwing up. And here's why we're screwing up. here, if we want low victim count,

Here's what we have to do. If I wrote a book that said, hey, if your kitchen wall catches on fire while you're cooking, if you grab a fire extinguisher and put it out in 15 seconds, you'll have far less damage to your house than if you go find a phone, call 911, tell them about the fire. They tell the fire department, the fire department drives out and put it out. Either way, the fire goes out. But if you grab a fire extinguisher and put it out, you'll have far less damage.

speaker-0 (14:55)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (15:16)
If I had written that book, no one would buy it because it's just blatantly obvious to the most casual observer. But for some reason, we can't see that obvious time and math equation for the activity.

speaker-0 (15:26)
We'll get into that in just a moment. alluded to Dr. Dean earlier. He's the one who was one of the

speaker-1 (15:33)
you

one of the two. In fact it got to where he looked at me and know what I'm gonna... So he's actually in the front of the book when I acknowledge people, it's him and people pestering me to write...

speaker-0 (15:37)
Yeah

He may hear us talking about him right now. I'm not sure he was on the podcast earlier and we talked about that. ⁓ You talked about connecting the dots and you're glad that you didn't write the book earlier because you were able to connect some of the dots that you hadn't quite connected. One thing I'm curious about, think writing sometimes forces you to connect dots that you see before you started writing. Did writing the book help you connect any?

speaker-1 (16:07)
It did. It helped me connect dots. It helped me connect them more clearly and it identified some little gaps that I'm like, man, if I had this and this, it would make it a more streamlined, easier to follow. So I had to do a little more looking around to do it.

speaker-0 (16:24)
Yeah. So we hosted you in Indiana ⁓ a little while ago. one of the things that people, the feedback that I got was, I tried to take good notes, but I just wish there was somewhere where I could find this information. And I think for those people in particular, even if you've never been to your seminar, but especially if they've been to your seminar and they thought they couldn't take good enough notes, I think your book is a great resource for them. Yes, it is.

speaker-1 (16:46)
Yes, yes, yes.

⁓ It only talks, well, the book is the problem, how we've been screwing it up, the time and math is important and what we have to do at the organizational level, meaning churches, businesses, and schools, and then individuals to get better. And so the class I give today and tomorrow, that might be my next. If I do another book, that might be the next one, which is okay.

fight for the American, for those of us who carry pistols, what are some considerations for us to get ready to do that better should we get into

speaker-0 (17:18)
So let's get into the time and math problem. You start out the book and you say, this is not a political book. This is just about time and math. This is purely an objective problem that I'm trying to get people to recognize and appreciate the problem so that we can address it effectively. So tell us, what is the time and math problem? And can you help give people an appreciation for why that first 30 seconds really does

speaker-1 (17:46)
Well, again, you can use the fire analogy. No one would argue, because it's strictly mathematical, it's not political. If you said if my fire starts in my kitchen and I put out 15 seconds, I'll have far less damage than if firemen put it out in eight minutes. No one would argue with this math. You can't argue with it. Well, the same thing with the active shooter. They shoot new victims at a fairly predictable rate. Now, yes, there's outliers. There are some active shooters that are extremely aggressive, some that are extremely slow.

If you look, there's been so many active shooters now, you can analyze it. In the first minute of the attack, you can expect the average active shooter to shoot a new person every three to five seconds. And initially that sounds to me, well, that's very fast. Well, it is, but why? Because they're gonna intentionally attack a crowded public place. They don't go out in the middle of the desert or the middle of the forest to do these attacks. They come to a crowded public place where no one expects them.

And so they can easily start shooting people in a crowd and most people are going to freeze, either have denial or shock and they'll just freeze. Even an untrained, low skilled person, which most active shooters are, thank God they haven't been an Ipsic Grandmaster or a Navy Seal yet. It's even easy for them in a crowded public place where no one expects it to go from their first victim to their second victim to their third victim to their fourth victim unless they're gun mouthed on guns.

And so it's going right to three to five in the first minute. Parkland shooter shot 24 people on the first floor in 90 seconds. If you run those numbers, it's a new victim every 3.75 seconds. And then in the second minute, the average shooter will shoot a new victim every six to eight seconds. Why the decline? Because people will start at that point making evasive measures.

and then it'll go down from there unless he comes across a new pocket of unshot people. The Parkland shooter shot 24 people on the first floor, nobody on the second floor, but when he went to the third floor, was hundreds of people packed in the hallway, so it's almost like he starts a new attack. His shoot rate's gonna go

speaker-0 (19:45)
And he, you talk about this in your book, he just quit. He had ammunition, had a functional firearm.

speaker-1 (19:51)
So many of them do. He's not unique. stopped. We look out. He fired his last shot five minutes and 32 seconds, five and a half minutes after his first shot. So his shooting lasted for five and a half minutes. When he quit, he had almost two-thirds of his ammunition unfired. His gun still worked. There were still hundreds of people in the building. He could have kept shooting. But a lot of them do that. They get to a point.

And they say, I did what I came to do. That's enough. And he dropped all of his left ammo and his rifle. He left campus. He got caught a couple hours later. I talked to, well, I've said that at one conference years ago, and there's a psychologist that came up and he said, I'm just making a theory out of my head, but it could be their adrenaline runs out. They've been fantasizing and planning this attack for months, and it's building up and building, and now they're finally in it.

and they just can't keep that level of excitement and adrenaline. And so that's why they kind of peter out and quit. I don't know if that's true, but yeah.

speaker-0 (20:48)
Well, and he made a, specifically the Parkland shooter made a statement beforehand, right, about how many he thought he could get.

speaker-1 (20:56)
Yeah, he wanted at least 20. At least 20. He got that in like a minute.

speaker-0 (20:59)
Right. Yeah. So that may be a part of it too. He achieved his

speaker-1 (21:03)
I did what I came to do. And he also said when you see me on the news, you'll all know who I am. So the reason most of these shooters do it is to become famous. If I'm an absolute loser and failure in life by every measurable standard, I can still be worldwide famous if I go shoot 20 or 30 people.

speaker-0 (21:19)
Right. One of the things that people often say in response, so they hear the time and math response, they at least seem to understand that issue, the time and math issue, so they say, well, let's just keep guns out of the school. Let's harden the building or the potential target. Let's you know, lock all the doors. You talk about that a lot in your book. You know, put stuff on the glass. You know, take it.

put special locks on these super duper locks. ⁓ Let's have a school resource officer. Can you talk about some of those issues and why that's not a solution?

speaker-1 (21:57)
Yeah, the schools desperately want a non-violent solution to an extremely violent problem and it doesn't exist. So hardening the building, well over 90 % of the active shooters that attack high schools and middle schools are students, current students of that school.

So your students are already in the building. So all that time, money and effort to harden it, better doors, better locks, film on the glass, is probably only going to delay the cops and the EMS that come in response to the shooting. We're not thinking through this. Schools like Bumper Sticker, One Size Fits All, Slow C**ts, Locked Doors for Safety, Locked Doors for Safety. if you're middle or high school, your students are already in there. You may have sent a bus to bring them in. So all that hardening doesn't work. And so to try to beat the time problem.

We say, well instead of the cops have to be notified to get here. We'll just have a cop already on campus and we'll solve this problem. That doesn't solve it. Because especially if it's a middle or a high school, the students know if there's an SRO. They know what the SRO looks like. So like almost all other violent criminals, they'll try extremely hard not to start their violent crime right in front of a cop. So in Santa Fe, Texas, two SROs at the Santa Fe High School in the cafeteria, so he went and shot in a different building.

And that's what most of them, they'll just shoot in a different part of the building, a different building, a different part of campus. So even though there's one or two cops in uniform there, even those cops have to wait on a radio call to tell them that there's been an active shooter. And by that time, by the time cops get a radio call on the police dispatch, there's plus or minus 20 people have already been shot. So Santa Fe, for instance, their first notification was a school radio that said, hey, the fire alarm's going off in the art complex.

And so they went over there to find out why the fire, they didn't get a call about the active shooter. And by that time, over 20 people had been shot. schools think that, I've heard them tell me, well, we have to this mandatory active shooter training, but we have an SRO, a school resource officer, who's here every day, so we don't have to worry about this. Well, yeah, you do. Columbine had a resource officer, Parkland had a resource officer, Santa Fe had two resource officers. But I only know of one active shooter attack, at least how I would define active shooter as school.

that had an SRO and that SRO just happened to be close enough because the shooter either didn't know or was just on one

speaker-0 (24:14)
One of the, ⁓ after Yuvaldi in particular, there was a lot of criticism of the police, but you talk about in your book, that wasn't a problem with the police. By the time the police arrived, the damage had already been done.

speaker-1 (24:27)
Yeah,

so just came from training cops in Maine. I talk at three international police conferences every year. I'm going to speak at the National Association of School Resolvers again this year. And whenever I'm just training cops, especially SROs, I start by asking them, many of y'all, okay, out of the 38 people shot at Yavall, how many of y'all think most of that responsibility for those shot people was law enforcement response? And even cops, 90 % them raise their hand. Yep, yep, yep, yep. How many of you think mostly responsible was the school?

almost nobody ever raises their hand for that. And then I'd show them that it was the school because the cops entered that building just under three minutes after the shooter did, which is miraculous. The only reason they could do that is he had shot outside four minutes earlier and the cops had already been called about that. So the cops were artificially there four minutes earlier than they otherwise would have been. He shot and the video cameras in the school had audio. So you can count the shots after the shooter entered the building.

He shot somewhere between 125 to 130 shots before the cops entered the building. He shot less than 30 shots after the cops were in there. So if he shoots well over 80 % of his gunshots that he fired in total before the cops get in there, I think it's safe and logical to assume he shot the vast majority of his victims before the cops got in.

And people don't understand they've never heard that they understand it now the cops are so I would you know I'm somewhere between 28 and 32 Is on the school's hands? Yep, and there's a handful because the cops came in or backed up But the cops also bear some number of people that died That could have that could have lived had the cops stopped quicker that bled out etc. But yeah people don't understand the math same thing about Parkland

The SRO didn't go in. If the SRO had been brave and went in, none of those people would have got shot. No, when he got there, all the people on the first floor were shot. He could have saved the people on the third floor. they just like, things were comfortable with, the SRO was a coward. If we have an SRO that's not a coward, then we'll be safe. Well, yeah, if the active shooter starts shooting very, very close to that brave SRO, probably won't be a big victim case. I don't care if you have Clint Eastwood in his younger days as your

SRO if he doesn't hear or see the first shot there's going to be a lot of victims.

speaker-0 (26:44)
So even if the officers who responded at Uvalde had acted perfectly when they arrived, 80 % of the damage had already been done.

speaker-1 (26:53)
did act very very good when they arrived. They ran into the building with guns drawn, not like Parkland who never entered the building. They ran in there with guns drawn, ran towards the shooting, sounds got down to the part of the hallway, they were hearing the shots and the shooter stopped shooting.

speaker-0 (27:07)
shooting.

speaker-1 (27:07)
So they're in the hall trying to figure out which classroom and then from inside the classroom 111 where the shooter was he shot back into the hallway the theory is he heard the cops heard their radio and he shot at them by shooting through the wall from inside the classroom then they broke contact after taking shots none of them got hit and then they never Reaggressed that was the screw and then even after they got shields ballistic shields in they didn't attack him for over almost an hour after that

The screw up was after they broke contact. Initially they were doing God's But even had they rushed in there right there and killed him, we'd still been looking at well over 20 people that were already shot before they broke He shot for a little over two and a half minutes completely unopposed. If you go in a crowded elementary school and no one tries to stop you for two and a half minutes, you're going to have a lot of

speaker-0 (27:39)
world.

One of the things that you do, ⁓ you host a heroes conference. ⁓ Can you talk about a few of those examples? know ⁓ there was at least Stephen Wilford who's here today. ⁓

speaker-1 (28:14)
just walk by, had dinner with him last night.

Can't be a hero, spend some time with heroes man, that's

speaker-0 (28:19)
I

try to do. That's right, yeah. And he's here, he's great, great to talk to. ⁓ You tell his story often. ⁓ You host the Heroes Conference. ⁓ Unfortunately, there were a number of victims in that particular scenario. ⁓ I'm blanking on the first name, but Wilson, ⁓ Jack Wilson, yeah. He stopped it very quickly. Can you talk about that example?

speaker-1 (28:34)
Jack

Yes, a man pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun inside the sanctuary during the service. The Sundies had the service. And there was roughly 250 people in the sanctuary when he did it and shot two people. And Jack drew his, and Jack was a member of the armed security team. He drew his pistol out of concealment and shot him through the head at 2.3 seconds after the first shot of the attack.

speaker-0 (29:03)
And there were still two victims even though he acted within 2.3 seconds. But that demonstrates I think the time in math. As opposed to these other examples we've been talking about.

speaker-1 (29:12)
Yes it.

Yes, and so after every active shooter attack we as a nation ring our hands and the media leads us in ringing our hands my goodness another one they keep happening. We can't seem to stop them. We don't know how stop Jack showed us how to stop them. Gina Somme, Stephen Williford Humberto Garcia, Eli Dick and Greg Stevens. long list of people that show us what works The only question is do we have the stomach to do what works? We absolutely know

speaker-0 (29:41)
You talk about this all the time, have to be present, willing and able. Unfortunately, Stephen Wilford wasn't present, so that was part of the delay. Still heroic, he just wasn't there in the moment when the attack.

speaker-1 (29:46)
President armed.

skilled and brave yes and so Andy Brown in Fairchild Air Force after he got the he was a military police officer on Fairchild Air Force Base on a bicycle patrol he got the call that there's an active shooter at the hospital he pedaled his bike a quarter of a mile after getting that radio call to the hospital dropped his bike and shot and killed the guy 70 yards just some of the most aggressive professional but they still had 26

speaker-0 (30:03)
advice.

speaker-1 (30:28)
Had Andy been in the first building the shooter went in or in the hospital where he went next, this would have ended with a little bit, he wouldn't there. know, cops have done great stuff, but the problem is cops aren't usually there. They are sometimes like Greg Stevens. But again, active shooters really try hard not to start their attack in front of a cop. So time matters.

speaker-0 (30:50)
So, what's the implication of all this? They have to be present, armed, willing and able. ⁓ And you have to counteract the violence with violence.

speaker-1 (31:02)
In my definition, a present is close enough to hear or see the first shot. Not somewhere on property, somewhere in the building.

You have to be, because people on the third floor are parked on, and didn't hear the shooting on the first floor. You have to be close enough to hear or see the first shot. Why? Because if the person who stops this attack is close enough to hear or see the first shot, then we don't have to wait on somebody to make a 911 call, and then we don't have to wait on the operator that took that call to make a radio call to police, and then we don't have to wait on police to travel there and get to the right location. And all that time is when the shooter is shooting massive amounts of people.

So if you look at the average shoot rate of the average active shooter, the only way to have a high expectation mathematically of having a single digit victim count, which is zero to nine, that's how I got a little low victim count, zero to nine, he has to be stopped within 30 seconds of the first shot. There's no physical way to communicate with someone who's not at the attack site and get them to the attack site within 30 seconds. So it leaves us with very,

very obvious but uncomfortable conclusion somebody at the attack site that he came to shoot one of them or if not more has to counter attack with deadly violence that can be with a gun that can be with a truck that can be with hot coffee that can be tackling any number of ways gun is by far the most efficient

Because when I talk to audience, say if you call a cop and tell them there's an active shooter here, cops have like 10 different tools on them. They got tasers and cuffs and radios and ticket books and pepper spray. I guarantee you the tool they're gonna have in their hands when they come in. And it's the gun because that's the most efficient, most likely way that it'll work.

speaker-0 (32:40)
You talk a little bit about, you ask people, how many victims are you willing to accept? everybody says, well, none. We hope none. But unless you're willing to accept the reality that beyond 30 seconds you're likely to have double digit count, and the reality that there's evil in the world and that people wish to do harm for whatever

speaker-1 (33:02)
That gets back to having experience in planning and managing combat and not. So in the Army, the Battalion S-1, which I suffered through for eight months and I'm still in therapy over it, one of the S-1's job in planning combat operations is they do the casualty estimation. So the commander and the operations officer make the plan. The S-1's job is to look at all the information and back then we had to use manuals. I'm sure it's computerized now.

and then they give the commander an estimate. based off of everything, think tomorrow's plan, given this, given everything we know about the weather and the train, enemy, we'll see 14 % casualties. It's an educated estimate. And the commander either says, I accept that, move forward, or I don't accept it. So if you don't accept it, you've to go back and change the plan, ask for more air support, ask for more to ask for something that will get the...

Estimate lower. That's the art of the best plan is the one that it results in the fewest amount of casualties And so leaders civilian leaders it took me too long to realize this once I started getting out and talk to the leaders of churches business and schools They've never done that before they don't want to do it when I when I try to coach them through it You know they like you said I want zero I zero I hope for zero and I pray for zero and that's fine But you have to set that aside hope can't be a part of your active shooter plan Yeah, because the only reason to execute an active shooter plan is if hope is failed

speaker-0 (34:22)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (34:23)
So if you say, my plan is zero, then that's not the person you want planning for this. Because as soon as he shoots his first person, then that plan's failed. The plan was zero, it's failed. Now the only active plan is the active shooter's plan, and we're not gonna like his plan. So we have to have a plan that goes beyond hope and goes beyond zero. And that's uncomfortable for a lot of people. So we have to, before we start planning, I coach them, we have to start with, I know you don't want any, you got that.

But if he comes here, what's the maximum acceptable number of shot people? That's what you have to start with. And then you look at the timeline of an active shooter and say, that tells you how soon you have to stop him. If you say, I'm willing to accept up to 25. If he comes here, I don't want him to. But if he does, I'm willing to accept up to 25. And you don't have to stop him until by the end of the third minute. And you're probably OK.

Instead, you say 20, you've got to stop him by the end of the second minute. But if they take my advice and have zero to nine victims, single digit victims as their goal, then their plan has to stop him by the end of the first 30 seconds.

speaker-0 (35:27)
And whether it's a school setting, a church setting, a business setting, whatever the matter doesn't matter you have to have somebody who's present, armed,

speaker-1 (35:31)
setting.

The rate of shooting new victims is pretty constant regardless of the location or who the shooter is.

speaker-0 (35:44)
It requires this acceptance of reality. We hope that a shooter never comes to the school, to the church,

speaker-1 (35:51)
I

and want him not to come, absolutely. But I hope and pray and want not to get in a car collision. But the good people at Ford had better put an airbag in my steering wheel. I don't want a house fire, but I've got a couple of fire extinguishers in my house. It's the same principle.

speaker-0 (36:05)
Yeah. You talk a little bit, one of the relatively new things, at least you see it a lot more frequently, schools are putting in scanners at the entrance to their, this is part of the hardening issue. They're desperate to find a solution, a hardening solution to avoid the reality that violence requires violence in return to stop it. Oh yeah. Can you talk a little bit about why the scanners at the entrance

speaker-1 (36:30)
⁓ there's a whole bunch of reasons. Metal detectors or scanners or whatever. ⁓ So you'd have to guarantee me he can't get any other way. that's you can't. A lot of things I tell them at school conferences they don't want to hear. One is if I want your school, get in your I'll hang around back where the cafeteria is where your employees are taking out trash all day long, deliveries are coming in all day long, your employees are stepping out to smoke and play on their phones. I'll get in your building or I'll shoot through the glass.

speaker-0 (36:46)
Cool.

speaker-1 (37:00)
Or, when I do a school, almost always cover the Red Lake, Minnesota, where he was a student of the high school, so he knew there was a metal detector there. And the metal detector will help other things. If you have thuglets that just want to carry a gun for status, that'll help with that. The kid that wants to carry a pocket knife in school, it'll help with that. Although I carried a pocket knife every day in high school, it didn't seem to be a problem. But in Red Lake, he drove the car right up to the front door.

walked right in and shot the guard at the metal detector and then walked right by the detector because what's coming is a creative adaptive evil thinking motivated enemy it's not a cooperative enemy he's not going to come with that kind of evil two guns eight hundred rounds of ammo and walk in and go crap a metal detector and turn around and walk back out ⁓ so that that won't work ⁓ we call that security theater people say we got a metal detector and all the staff and all the students go there were safe there were safe there were

speaker-0 (37:56)
I was thinking about you and your book on the way here this morning. I walked from my hotel to the convention center and I passed by a school, a very nice school, looks like pretty affluent. Students go there. I could see the students entering the building, walking through a scanner with their arms raised as they enter the building and I'm thinking security theater, security theater. Every time a student walks through. to me, what helps illustrate

The ineffectiveness of the scanner at the entrance to the building is... ⁓ Yvaldi. He shot out in the parking lot. They knew he was coming. He still shot for three...

speaker-1 (38:36)
90 seconds before he entered the building.

speaker-0 (38:38)
So

even if an alarm goes off at the building's entrance, he's still going to have three, four minutes at least before somebody receives

speaker-1 (38:46)
An

untrained, very low skilled person can shoot a lot of people in a crowded building in two and a half, three minutes. And that's Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. attend church, school safety conferences. They're almost always in the summer. A lot of them are put on by the state's School Resource Officers Association, but some are by schools, some are by organizations. And they're filled.

speaker-0 (38:53)
needs.

speaker-1 (39:12)
with a vendors like there's vendors here selling products for safety saying if you buy our product your kids will be safe. Right well who wouldn't want that check if you believed it if you believe the sale page so one I don't want to name the name but there's one company and they're one of the major sponsors of all the school safety that has the app and computer thing that will allow you to notify the police really quick and save lives

You've already had that. They had bought it, they had it. It didn't help them one bit. And then there's companies that sell artificial intelligence systems that work within your pre-existing security cameras and it identifies ⁓ weapons when they're pulled out. Well, Nashville paid over million dollars for one of those programs. A kid pulled out a gun in a cafeteria, the system failed to identify. So schools are buying all kinds of things that won't help.

We'd like to focus on, how can we get the cops here 15 seconds earlier than they... And I'm all for that, but that just means, you know, the victim count will be 24 instead of 20. I'm all for getting the cops here sooner, but if we really want to approach this problem and cause a low victim count, it has to be over before the cops get there. It's already over, we're already treating a prep and the few casualties that we let in. I jokingly say you're on your third cigarette by the time the first cop gets there. If...

speaker-0 (40:15)
Yeah.

Yeah

speaker-1 (40:33)
We want to cause a low.

speaker-0 (40:34)
victim

count. ⁓

speaker-1 (40:42)
And

that's not a guarantee, but that's about a 90 % solution. That's the outer edge. I'd rather stop him in 4 seconds, 5 seconds, 15 seconds. I would rather do that. Then you just have fewer single digits. The problem is we all want that. If you get a group of people together, and I don't care what their makeup is, old, young, male, female, Republican, Democrat, atheist, Catholic, Yankees fan, Mets fan, and you say if an active shooter starts shooting people, how soon do you want it to stop? They all say immediately.

speaker-0 (40:53)
Vectors. Yeah.

speaker-1 (41:10)
But they all won't agree to make a plan that actually will accomplish.

speaker-0 (41:14)
Yeah. You alluded to this already. Many people have heard the advice, run, hide, fight. Correct. You flipped that on its head. You said fight, flee, barricade. Correct. Can you talk about that? Sure.

speaker-1 (41:26)
So the absolute worst policy that a school or other organization have is lock down. Where everybody does the same thing regardless of where the shooter is. But that's the easiest thing to type and it's the easiest thing to drill. So that's what most schools have. That's the worst. So the next thing is at least you give them choices. So for the last 40 plus years the federal government has said run, hide, fight, fight only as a last resort. So if anybody out there that hears this goes into Google and puts in run, hide, fight, that's what you'll find. Run, hide, fight, fight only as a last resort.

Why? Mathematically, why? So, run, run, run, run, run. There's nowhere else to go. There's no exit. We can't run away anymore. Well, I'm gonna hide. But he finds me. So now, reluctantly, begrudgingly, because there is no other way, we'll let you fight, but only because you've exhausted the other two. Why isn't fight first? The sooner somebody fights him and stops him, the fewer victims will be shot. No one says, want more human shot. They all say, I want less human shot. Well, the way to accomplish that somebody fights him immediately.

And the goodness of this is everybody doesn't have to fight. I say fight is the first choice everybody should consider, not do, because everyone's not capable of it, mentally or physically. But the goodness is, the good luck is, he is gonna attack a crowded place with 50 or more people. Out of any population anywhere in America that's 50 or more people, there's one or two people there.

that are physically and mentally capable of fighting. All we needed was Jack Wilson. All we needed was Gina Somme. All we needed was Eli Dickon. All we needed was Greg Steed. We only need one or two. That's all we need. So everybody doesn't have to fight. But we need those people who will fight there. And so if an organization, church, school, business, wants a plan, they need to identify who those fighters are and spread them out.

If a school has fighters, we don't want them all on same wing, the same floor. We want to spread them out. Preferably, the best case scenario, no matter where the shooting starts, one, or preferably two of our fighters is close enough to stop it.

speaker-0 (43:22)
really enjoyed your book. I've attended a number of your seminars. Can you tell folks who are interested in your book and plan on buying your book, what's the value of your seminars in addition to the book? And I think there's a great deal of value.

speaker-1 (43:37)
Well,

the book's kind of an overall general, so it's going to touch on everything. And I do do some presentations like that, but I also focus, you know, if I'm going to talk to a school, I'm only going to talk about school attacks. And I'm going to go deeper into planning, training, and policy, and building alterations specifically for schools. That might not be in some Simmons, not the ones I'm doing here, because the time is so short. If I go to talk to cops, I'm going to talk about, if I'm talking to school resource officers, I'm going to cover the school stuff.

But then when I talk to cops, I pull out specific law enforcement lessons learned. About half that's the kinetic gunfight, which is what we want cops to do. But there's commo, aftermath, other police issues, SRO issues. If I talk to churches, I only talk about church attacks. And so I talk about the attacker at churches, how they differ than other places, what's most likely, and specifically talk about churches.

That's what benefit when I talk to specific groups, can focus, narrow the conversation to what they want to know, what they need.

speaker-0 (44:38)
And you talked about you didn't want a book that was 600 pages long. You got a 200 page book, very accessible, very readable for most people. ⁓ Gives you the broad overview of the problem and how to address the problem. But if you want more specifics on the plan, on the location, that's where the value of the seminar comes

speaker-1 (44:56)
And

the longer the presentation, more information. Getting hosted in Rochester by Dave Jenkins in late August and we're going to do an entire day. So basically eight hours, which is, I've done it a day and a half, but eight hours, that's a pretty long day. And that's really only for gun people. The average citizen that's not a gun person, a training person, they don't want, they want about two hours. One to two hours is about all they can stand, but gun people can do more.

speaker-0 (45:21)
Yeah, and every location is different, Not every school is the same, not every church is the same, every business is the same. you may have an idea about the general plan, but a specific plan tailored to that location, to that business, to that entity is going to...

speaker-1 (45:36)
And for schools, I have a three-phased training plan, if you will. Phase one is the presentation. What's the problem with the active shooter? Why is time important? How have we screwed up so much in the past? What do need to change? What are everybody's three options? If it starts, how to choose? How should individuals choose? And then some other stuff about the building. then step two and three, they can usually do on their own. I tell them how to do it. It's very easy. They can do it after I leave.

But sometimes they want me to stay and walk them through it. So step two is a floor plan exercise. We put up a floor plan of the building. So that's different. Every school is different. One floor, two floors, big, small. And we start where it's most likely for that school. So at a high school, it's the cafeteria. If it's a middle school, it's the hallways. If it's an elementary, it's either shooting the way in or shooting the kids on the playground, which has happened four times. If a shooting happens here, we start where it's most likely.

what does everybody do given that you're in a different location? And the purpose of that exercise is for everybody to realize, one of the most important reasons I base my decision on what I do and if I supervise kids, what we're all gonna do is where I am in relation to the shooter. If he starts in my classroom, which is very rare by the way, but we talk about in classrooms, then maybe what I do is different from what the teacher way down the hall does, right?

So that's the purpose of that. we do all the different locations and then step three is the walk through. We walk through everywhere. Everybody walks through. So we all walk through the school and we get to your classroom, Mr. Rooley, okay, for whatever reason, you decide to fight. Show me your fight plan. Show me the weapons that you have, that you brought in, which is the most effective, best legal weapon for wherever you are. And then tell me who's involved in this fight plan. And if you're middle or high school teacher, I want to hear students.

And then it's okay good stop that now show me your fleet plan. Walk me through your the different options of your fleet plans if you have windows show me how you open them if they can't be open show me the tool you have in to break the window the decorative quilt you have on the wall that's purpose is to throw in that window after you break it if you Teach little kids show me the furniture under the window that they can get up on you've already thought through that whole plan and all those options And then we all we walk through everywhere

We walk through the front office, the janitor's closet, the media center, the gym, and everybody talks to it. That way everybody learns. When I'm in your classroom, and I'm the next one or the fourth classroom down, when you're giving your plan, I'll probably hear you say something that, I didn't even think of that. That's a good idea. And so we cross-level what we've come up with. Just a little shout out of school I did in Iowa.

speaker-0 (48:08)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (48:12)
legally, technically they can arm their staff because of administrative technicality right now they can't so the principal said any of the staff that wants it I will buy you a baseball bat the school will buy you a baseball bat with the school logo on it so it's a spirit yay spirit go Eagles I don't have that button there mascot but on opposite day which is what I call the shooting day the attack day now we're going to hit him in the head or the windpipe or if sticks an arm through the broke window to unlock it we're going to break his arm

Cuz we've already leaned forward and said we are responsible to stop it. The cops are coming and they'll have weeks of stuff to do here clearing the building crime scene. But we will have it stopped, we're taking that responsibility.

speaker-0 (48:50)
Yeah, and a baseball bat's way better than nothing. Correct. And hunkering down. Correct.

speaker-1 (48:56)
The non-gun response so far has by far been tackling physically and that works, it has worked but a baseball bat would be...

speaker-0 (49:06)
One of the things you talk about, we'll wrap up here just shortly, ⁓ is teachers, administrators, they often say, this is a place for learning. This is not a place for violence. And I think the way you say that is really effective. You say, listen,

every day of the week that there's not an active shooter here that's what it is a place for learning it's a place you know for ⁓ teaching it's a place for all those things but when the shooters here none of that is taking place and there has to be somebody willing to engage in that combat it's this is a combat zone when somebody chooses to make

speaker-1 (49:40)
The attack day, no matter where it happens, what I call opposite day. All the rules are different. What used to be important is not. What used to be really, really important is not. What we didn't used to care about now is vitally important.

It's completely different games. So say every other day we're playing checkers. When the first shots fire we're playing rugby. Completely different set of rules. So pedagogy is a fancy word that, and I have a master's in education, is a fancy word that educators like to use to prove how smart they are that talks about the formal process of education. And when I talk to teachers I say once that first shot's fired, ain't no pedagogy going on anymore. Now there's a lot of learning.

But ain't no pedagogy going on. Everybody's job, once the first shot's fired, no matter what your title used to be, your title used to, before the first shot, may have been janitor, it may have been counselor, it have been assistant principal, it may have been chemistry teacher or football coach. But once the first shot's fired, all of our jobs, to include our kids, all of our jobs, is to stop the killing of us. That's common. Ain't no pedagogy going on. It's time to get physical.

speaker-0 (50:39)
Well, Ed, I really appreciate you being here today to record the podcast. ⁓ Can you tell us once again for the listeners, can they find your book? Where can they find out more about your seminars, your training?

speaker-1 (50:48)
but i would like to squeeze in one thing first to show this work so in the past ten months we've had five active shooter attacks that were stopped by the victims quickly with a low victim count. Two of those were guns. The Michigan synagogue and the Michigan church back in June of last year. Those were stopped by armed people. But the hockey game, the high school hockey game in Rhode Island, Old Dominion University and the recent one this month in high school in Oklahoma, non-armed people.

Stopped so what I tell audiences is what you fight him with is negotiable It's debatable, but the fact you have to fight him is not the fact that the victims have to fight him is not mathematically debatable

if we want a low victim count. So we've had five here in the last 10 months that proves that this time thing works and we have to fight him back in the first 30 seconds. So my book, First 30 Seconds, it was published in think June 24th. It just went over 5200 copies sold on Amazon and that doesn't count all the ones I personally buy and give away and sell. So it's on Amazon. I have a webpage, first 30 second, first30-seconds.com.

If you go there, there'll be a button. It'll talk about the book, but there'll be a button that says, now. If you click on that, it'll take you to Amazon. Or you can just go to Amazon and look for First 30 Seconds. Make sure it's my name. There's other fake books out there. And it's in Heartback for $29.99, Paperback for $19.99, or eBook. It was $3.99. EBooks for you. Ebook people, $4. And by the end of the year, he said optimistically, by the end of the year, I hope to have autumn.

speaker-0 (52:32)
Very cool, very cool. Well, thanks again Ed for taking the time to record this. Really appreciate the work that you're doing and hopefully saving lives. course, you often don't know if you are or not, but I'm sure you...

speaker-1 (52:36)
Thank you so much.

So much

You

are. email is Edmonk at AOL.com. name, yes, AOL is still in business. Edmonk at AOL.com. If I can help anybody out there, your area, your police, your schools, your churches, please contact me. That's what I...

speaker-0 (52:57)
Alright, well thanks again. Thanks everybody for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I really encourage you to go check out his book. ⁓ If you've got a church, school, school board, anybody who might benefit from hearing Ed speak or reading his book, ⁓ I encourage you to spread the word. Again, most people agree with, they can get on board with this time in math problem.

but don't know how to convince others to see the problem themselves. I think Ed does the best job that I'm aware of of articulating the problem ⁓ in a persuasive way, in a way that I think illustrates the need for somebody to be present, armed, and able to respond to active violence.

speaker-1 (53:38)
That's why we're

speaker-0 (53:39)
Alright, thanks again Ed and thanks everybody for tuning in. always you can find the podcast on YouTube, Rumble, Facebook and X and all the most popular podcast streaming platforms. Until next time, remember you are the Forge of Freedom.