The Nashville Covenant School Shooting

Kids going to ride a school bus

The body cam video released by the Metro Nashville Police Department indicates one thing. This WAS NOT going to be another Uvalde. The officers acted heroically and ran to the sound of gun fire to take down the shooter. These officers did absolutely everything right!

But if you study the timeline you will see that the first shots were fired at 10:11 AM, the first calls to 911 came in at 10:13 AM and by 10:23 officers were on site and inside the school. At 10:25 they located, engaged and stopped the shooter.

You could not have asked for a better response from the officers once they got on the scene, but it takes time for them to get there. The timeline shows it took almost 10 minutes from the time 911 call came in until the officers entered the school. That may sound like an extremely long time, but even local law enforcement have told me that in pre-planned Active Shooter drills when everyone is expecting the drill the response time can be 5 plus minutes.

Ed Monk, with Last Resort Firearms Training, who will be offering several different Active Shooter Classes at Boondocks in May (See our Course Spotlight section) states that on average there is a death every 10 SECONDS. Even on-site School Resource Officers (SRO) don’t guarantee your safety. Parkland Highschool had a SRO who refused to go in and 17 people lost their lives. In Santa Fe, TX the SRO went in alone but was seriously injured and could not shoot back. Ten additional people died before more officers arrived.

In Active Shooter events, the shooting usually doesn’t stop until the bad guy runs out of ammo, runs out of victims, is shot by a good guy with a gun, or confronted by a coordinated counterattack. In our June 2022 Blog Post entitled “How to Reduce Mass Shooting Casualties” we give you a dozen examples of these counter attacks. Even an unarmed counter attack can drastically reduce the number of casualties until LE arrives. Programs such as Boondocks FTA™ Active Shooter class utilizes a series of demonstrations and drills to teach staff members how to perform an enhanced lockdown, and if necessary, counter the active shooter.

The bottom line is, help may be coming, but HELP AIN’T COMIN’ in time to save EVERYONE. It is up to YOU to plan, prepare and RESPOND if you want to protect yourself, your family, your students, your co-workers or you congregation from gun violence.

Learn more about Boondocks FTA’s Active Shooter Training or our extensive offering of Handgun Training Classes.