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To all you “Sandy Hook truthers” who donated hard-earned money to Wolfgang Halbig: your money was well-spent.

Because he went and did it. On May 6th Wolfgang Halbig, the alleged former cop and “Sandy Hook truther” who has been begging his followers for donations, actually went to Newtown, Connecticut to “find the truth” firsthand. And you know how he went about searching for the truth? He went to a school board meeting.

That’s right. Halbig berated the Newtown school board. Because obviously, the school board has been pulling all the strings of this massive conspiracy.

Here’s video of the meeting:

Of course, when the board members came “eyeball to eyeball” with Halbig (his words), they immediately broke. After Halbig’s first question, the board collectively said, “Curses! You’ve caught us! Yes, we faked the massacre! No children died that day! We lied about it so we could pass new gun control laws! And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling truthers!”

Well, actually, that didn’t happen. Halbig didn’t even ask questions. Instead, he just made a rambling statement about how the school board should tell the truth, then sat down. The board stayed silent. In fact, they refused to respond to any of the wackos and morons who attended the meeting. Even the wacko who showed up in a Paul Revere costume.

Shocked? Me neither.

Halbig did his best to sound reasonable. The problem is, he’s not. He claimed his questions weren’t offensive to any parents who lost children. Since he’s calling those parents liars, that’s nonsense. He also says his questions aren’t offensive to any Connecticut police officers involved in the investigation. Since he accuses the officers of lying about an event he claims never happened, that’s nonsense.

He also explained, with hurt obvious in his voice, that his offers to help had been ignored. Two days after the massacre, he called Newtown. He told people he was a school safety expert. He tried to help. But amazingly enough, nobody at Newtown asked this private citizen, not working in law enforcement, from another state, with no connection whatsoever to the crime, to get involved in the investigation.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, for some insane reason people who actually are involved in the investigation aren’t rushing to answer all of Halbig’s stupid questions.

I have to wonder, is anyone surprised by this? If some self-righteous weirdo with no connection to a crime tries to insert himself into the investigation, law enforcement should ignore him. When that same self-righteous weirdo then demands answers to a list of stupid, irrelevant questions (“I want to know who ordered portajohns three hours after the shooting!”), anyone with a brain dismisses him. When said weirdo then travels to Newtown and makes a pointless statement to the school board, what’s the right thing to do?

Personally, I think the right thing to do is publicly humiliate him. But freezing him out with silence is almost as good.

As of today, Halbig has raked in over $20,000 (http://www.gofundme.com/7jb3ww). Thus far he’s used it to file Freedom of Information Act requests (which don’t cost $20K), fly to Newtown (which doesn’t cost $20K) and make a three-minute statement to a school board (which doesn’t cost anything at all). Based on all that, I’m going to make a prediction:

Halbig isn’t going to get any eyeball-to-eyeball answers in Newtown. His FOIA requests aren’t going to turn up anything new either. Does Halbig think the government, after releasing the official report with thousands of pages of documents, is keeping secret documents titled “OPERATION ‘TAKE THEIR GUNS': THE MASTER PLAN TO FAKE A SCHOOL MASSACRE”? How big of a dumbass do you have to be to think Sandy Hook was a massive conspiracy, but the entire thing can be brought down by an FOIA request?

“Haha! We did it! We faked a school massacre, and got away with it! We’ll never get caught! Wait, what’s this? Oh my god, it’s an FOIA request! Now we have to give up all the evidence proving this was a conspiracy! We’re doomed!”

Halbig has accomplished nothing with that $20K. So now he’s going to ask for more. He’s going to scream and rant about the government’s refusal to answer his questions, he’s going to receive some documents that he’ll claim are lies like the official report, and he’ll ask for more money so he can go back to Newtown to really get the truth. And maybe he will actually go back, and he’ll file more FOIA requests. But he still won’t learn anything new.

Then he’ll ask for more money. And moronic “truthers” will keep giving it to him.

Since I first wrote about Halbig and the stunning stupidity of the Sandy Hook truther movement (http://chrishernandezauthor.com/2014/03/02/refuting-a-sandy-hook-truther/), I’ve wasted many hours debating conspiracy theorists. Pointing out obvious facts is useless on them. And they keep acting like their stupid questions somehow prove something. So I’ll say this, which I think is a good bottom-line statement to all conspiracy theorists:

Questions aren’t evidence. Under the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which most of you claim to love, we can’t convict people without evidence. If you believe in convicting people without evidence, you’re an anti-American piece of crap. So if you have actual evidence of a conspiracy, lay it out. If you don’t, then shut the f**k up.

YOU ARE READING THIS ON AN NSA-CONTROLLED “SHILL” WEB SITE!

Know how I know that? Conspiracy theorists said so.

A couple of weeks ago I published an essay titled “Refuting Wolfgang Halbig, a Sandy Hook ‘truther’” (http://chrishernandezauthor.com/2014/03/02/refuting-a-sandy-hook-truther/). Halbig is supposedly a former police officer and “expert” on school shootings. According to numerous web sites quoting an interview he gave, he claims no children were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012. He believes the Sandy Hook massacre was a “scripted event”.

Halbig had a list of eighteen points that supposedly “prove” Sandy Hook never happened. Using my experience as a police officer and active shooter instructor, I refuted each one. Some of Halbig’s points were pretty stupid (he apparently thought when someone is shot to death, all the blood drains from their body) and others were just, well, meaningless (the United Way raised money for the parents of Sandy Hook victims! It’s a conspiracy!).

The essay got a pretty positive response, at first. But within a few days, “truthers” heard about it. So they started coming to my blog and commenting. A few made calm, articulate statements. But most were what I would call ranting. And projecting. And accusing. And screaming. And probably slobbering.

Those ranting, irrational conspiracy theorists gave me some of the best entertainment I’ve had since starting this blog. I spent two weeks debating truthers, until they apparently got tired of it and one day just stopped commenting. Maybe that was random, maybe they had some kind of a conspiracist powwow and decided they were driving up my ratings by commenting, so they quit.

However, I learned a few things about truthers during my two-week debate with them. I had already known some of these things, or suspected them. But the last two weeks gave definite form to my previously unformed beliefs.

Everything I’m about to write is strictly my opinion. I’m not a psychologist, nor do I have much formal education. I’m just a cop and soldier who has spent decades learning how humans behave under stress. And as far as I can tell, disagreeing with a truther puts them under considerable stress. This essay is by no means an all-inclusive list of every way that conspiracists are screwed up, that would require numerous volumes.

I’ll also say this: I don’t believe everything the government says. For example, I believe many people in the federal government are lying their asses off about decisions made during the Benghazi attack. I don’t blame anyone for not blindly accepting official explanations. I do, however, blame people for buying into ridiculous conspiracy theories that would require thousands of regular people to carry out outrageous crimes while directly in the public’s eye. Incompetence and “spinning bad news” aren’t the same as conspiring to massacre innocent people in order to accomplish a political goal.

So having said that, let’s venture into the small, barren and occasionally dangerous mind of the conspiracy theorist.

A SAMPLING OF COMMENTS TO MY ESSAY, AND MY OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THEM

1) “Hey shill boy, YOU’RE SHITTY LITTLE SITE IS NOW COMING UP BEFORE WOLGANGS OWN FB PAGE……Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ……
AGAIN, WHY NOT JUST PUT UP A FLASHING NEON SIGN SAYING ‘THIS SHITTY LITTLE, CIA FUNDED SHILL SITE IS NOW BEING PROMOTED TO THE NUMBER ONE SEARCH LINK FOR WOLGANG HALBIG WHEN SOMEONES SEARCHES GOOGLE/CIA.
Good God. You clowns are so blatant it’s actually humorous…ha ha ha ha ha ha …..You will have zero effect. I won’t waste anymore time here.
I urge SH truth researchers to leave this site to the shills.
This is a well known tactic. They want you to focus energy battling a neon sign flashing SHILL SITE. Don’t do it.
These clowns are internet actors in the way the SH parents etc were. Let them have their fake conversations with each other while we provide financial and legal support for Wolf.”

2) “chris hernandez the author is a troll and/or a shill, as his article is so full of irrelevant fodder and contains absolutely no facts. SH was scripted and liars lie. Why else would the dumb medical examiner say, ‘I hope they don’t have this come crashing down on them later.’”

I think these are my favorite comments. According to Webster, to shill is to “to talk about or describe someone or something in a favorable way because you are being paid to do it”. So according to these guys, I don’t actually believe what I wrote; I’m simply a paid spokesman for the Sandy Hook conspirators. No evidence exists to support their accusation, but that matters not. To them there is no other possible explanation.

This is something I now know about conspiracists: they don’t need evidence to “prove” something. Once they’ve decided “there is no other explanation for X”, X becomes true in their eyes. Even when there is literally not a shred of proof to support X, they’ll believe it. It’s not possible that I’m simply a regular Joe who read Halbig’s points, thought “That’s a load of crap” and wrote a rebuttal. No, I’m being paid to do this. And the CIA or NSA is boosting my site’s rankings so more people will read what they paid me to write. Despite any actual evidence to prove this, they believe it.

3) Hey – how did you get this tiny little site, with next to zero traffic, come up as the very first response to a google of “wolfgang halbig”? Can you say NSA? I knew that you could! (Try it for yourself, Google “wolfgang halbig” and see what’s up first)
And, while we’re debunking, please explain how 20 children were shot to death in a school, and there are zero lawsuits? Oh, and six grown ups too, and still no lawsuits. Not Possible here in the good old litigious USA.”

4) “Based on the facts about web ranking that I have put forward here, you should be able to see that it is absolutely impossible for your site to come up first on a Google search in front of the man’s own site you are denouncing.
So, you are either in collusion with those that can manipulate the rankings (Google/NSA) or – you are an unknowing useful prop, meaning the NSA is secretly pumping your site up without your knowledge.
Only you know the answer to that riddle. But if you are ignorant of what is giving you such a tail wind, then I ask that you consider why they would be surreptitiously promoting your viewpoint. If Wolfgang is wrong, and there were children murdered, why would they even bother themselves with this secret promotion of the contrary opinion? They wouldn’t need to do this, they would have the TRUTH on their side.
Submitted for your consideration.”

I’m no Google expert, but it seems to me that if more people come to my site than Halbig’s Facebook page, my site will come up first on a search. Am I wrong about this? Whatever the answer, these comments “prove” that I’m either colluding with the CIA/NSA or am an unknowing pawn of those agencies. It couldn’t be that Halbig doesn’t have too many visitors to his new FB page, or that many of his own followers came here to read and comment and therefore drove up my ranking. No, the nefarious federal government had to have been involved. Is any proof required? Of course not.

And by the way, the day truthers stopped commenting on my site, it stopped coming up as #1 on Google searches for Wolfgang Halbig. Crazy, isn’t it?

4) Not a single ‘wounded’ child from that day. Nothing.
That means the gunman – this 20 year old kid – had to get up close, concentrate, focus and aim directly at 5 and 6 year old children and place each shot with such an exactitude as to guarantee a kill – not once, twice or even ten times – but over 20 times.
Satan himself could not have even done such a thing.
It is an all but physical impossibility. He would have grown sick, weak and unable to continue after several kills.
If you have ever aimed a weapon and fired upon an innocent human being, you know that it is an extremely difficult thing to do.
Until I and a million other people have seen at least one image – of either a dead child, a wounded child, an autopsy photo, or…even a photo of a child in a casket – we will never believe another so-called ‘official story’ about anything – from anyone in our government – whether, local, state or federal. Ever again.
And this is precisely what I think the government wants, out of this alleged tragedy: for us to discover that they are liars – and for us to grow angry and distrustful towards them – so we will, in turn, rebel and revolt against them – so they, in turn, can arrest, kill and imprison as many of us as they can, placing us in all those ‘FEMA CAMPS’ that they have spent the past ten+ years building. They want to bring about THE END, people, of the current world as we know it.
BIBLICAL SH!T, people.
Prepare yourselves. With the Armor of God, the Armor of Jesus. The Armor of Truth.”

Yes, that’s a lot of crazy to pack into one comment. But it’s not the crazy that caught my attention. It’s the absolute lack of understanding of human nature.

Of course, no human has ever murdered children at close range. Such things didn’t happen at Srebrenica, or at the San Ysidro McDonald’s. They certainly never happened during the Holocaust, when the men of Police Battalion 101, among other units, shot thousands of women and children. Or during the Armenian Genocide. Or the Mumbai terrorist attack. Or the Beslan School massacre. Or the Kenya Mall attack. This commenter nearly broke his hand thumping a bible but apparently never read it, or he would have heard of Joshua’s army killing every living thing in Jericho (which would have entailed stabbing infants to death).

But since nobody would ever shoot numerous children, “not even Satan himself”, it’s only logical that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened. But the government and media are claiming this impossible event actually happened. Presto, we have a conspiracy.

This next commenter and I had a long exchange, which I’ll delve further into in a later post. But I want to point out part of one comment he made, to illustrate his (and truthers’ in general) weird way of looking at human behavior. The comment is about Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs in the Boston Bombing, and Carlos Arredondo, who helped save his life. Bauman and Arredondo were seen together in this famous photograph (fair warning, graphic content ahead):

Wonder how the Boston Bombing got injected into this discussion? Because, of course, that was a government conspiracy too.

“The very next day “Jeff Bauman” and Cowboy Carlos (from the Dominican Republic…who had a Devil Dog son die in Iraq on Carlos’ birthday) are on Facebook with Jeff sitting up in bed, laughing, smiling….no IVs…no morphine pump…NO sign of trauma. Happy and smiling!
Carlos and Cindy Sheehan. Code Pink.
Carlos tried to kill himself and the Marine detail sent to tell him that his son died. Lucky for him there was a quick thinking Marine or Carlos never would have got the chance wheel “Jeff” down the street…and pose with him everywhere…Bruins…Celtics…Red Sox…and Patriot games.
Cindy ain’t in the game anymore. Carlos is.
Code Pink..”

This commenter apparently thinks Carlos Arredondo, an anti-war activist who lost a Marine son in Iraq and a second son to suicide, colluded with whoever “really” planted the Boston Marathon bombs. His job was to act like he was rescuing Jeff Bauman, who didn’t really lose his legs that day. And I don’t exactly get this part, but Code Pink, those bunch of hysterical, moronic women who dress in vagina costumes, paint their hands red, sing and dance at military recruiting offices and shriek at political foes, were also somehow involved. Because it’s totally believable that Code Pink idiots and a peace activist like Arredondo would conspire to trick the entire country into believing that someone other than the government bombed Boston. Or something like that.

So let’s look at the mechanics of how this “conspiracy” would have worked.

Since Jeff Bauman must have already lost his legs before the bombing, he showed up to the Boston Marathon wearing fake legs. He stayed a safe distance away from where he knew the bombs were; he had to have, if he had been too close he might have been killed. Then, when the bomb detonated, he rushed over, took his fake legs off to expose “moulaged” fake injuries, and laid down among other injured people. Also, according to some conspiracists, he or someone else spread red paint near him. Someone else must have also grabbed his fake legs, hidden them in a bag or something and left. Actual legs, with injuries that matched Bauman’s, would have to have been left at the scene, since that bomb was not powerful enough to completely destroy every last bit of his legs and someone might have looked around and said, “Hey, this guy’s legs were blown off. Shouldn’t they be around here somewhere?” Also, his face must have been quickly made up to appear as if he had been near the explosion, and his hair moussed to appear that it had been affected by the blast (it would have been sorta difficult to walk around the Boston Marathon with a blackened face and hair blown sideways without attracting attention).

At this point, after Bauman rushed to the scene, laid down and removed his fake legs and spread fake blood, and after someone else removed the fake legs and left real ones, and quickly made Bauman’s face and hair appear affected by the explosion (and all of this without being noticed by either bystanders or cameras), Bauman started acting like a real victim. Then Arredondo came to his rescue, helped tourniquet his legs and put him in a wheelchair, and with others pushed him to an ambulance.

One of the others who helped was apparently an EMT, according to the patch on his jacket. I attended an EMT course several years back. It’s not advanced training, but an EMT can identify a minor injury like, oh, someone having their legs blown off. So why would this EMT have played along by treating and evacuating someone for an injury they didn’t really have? Either he wasn’t really an EMT, or…wait for it…he was part of the conspiracy.

Then, while they were pushing him to the ambulance, they happened to run across a photographer who took the famous photograph above. This was fortuitous, since all this conspiracizing would have been for naught if nobody took pictures of it. The pictures are what grabbed everyone’s attention.

But what if it the photographer’s presence wasn’t a happy accident? Maybe the photographer was waiting on the route he knew they would take, so he could take a picture of injuries he knew were fake. Maybe the photographer was…oh my god…part of the conspiracy.

So they arrived at the ambulance. The paramedics in the ambulance, of course, would have been able to identify fake injuries. So would the doctors and nurses at the hospital. But the paramedics, doctors and nurses treated injuries they knew were fake, they didn’t protest or tell the press “this guy wasn’t even hurt”, because…well…actually, why would doctors and nurses play along?

You guessed it. They had to be part of the conspiracy.

Conspiracists believe this is what actually happened. Many of them actually think a veteran named Nick Vogt who had previously lost his legs in Afghanistan pretended to be “Jeff Bauman”. Vogt and Bauman really don’t look alike, other than being white and thin. But truthers have convinced themselves, without any evidence Vogt was involved, that Vogt is also part of the conspiracy. Because assigning guilt without evidence is what truthers do. People like them are the reason we have constitutional safeguards; if truthers ran criminal courts, innocent people would be convicted left and right based on “I know you did it! There’s no other explanation!” or “You’re guilty! You look sort of like the guy who I think was part of the conspiracy!”

These truther fools use nonsense “logic” and conduct predetermined “investigations” to convince themselves and others who are equally mentally deficient that a conspiracy is hiding under every rock. Conspiracy theorists are a lot like “Creation Scientists”. No, not like fundamentalist Christians who believe in the Genesis story, but creation scientists. These “scientists” don’t follow the scientific method whatsoever. Rather than formulating a hypothesis, experimenting and researching and then reaching a conclusion, they start with the conclusion. They “know” the Genesis story is true; therefore, every piece of “evidence” they find is twisted to support what they already believe, or if it can’t be twisted it’s simply discarded as fake.

“Truthers”, “truth researchers” and “conspiracy investigators” are no different. They’re positive the Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy (as was the Boston Bombing, and the JFK assassination, and the Moon Landing, and probably the missing Malaysian airliner, and so on). So everything they see becomes “evidence” of conspiracy, and gigantic obvious pieces of real evidence, like the photos of Bauman’s horrible wounds, are discarded as fake. And while these truthers carry out their bullshit “investigations” that determined guilt within minutes of the event, they assign blame to good, decent men and women who suffered horrible losses at the hands of truly evil, non-government criminals and terrorists.

Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs to cowardly bombers: conspirator!

Carlos Arredondo, who rushed to help a horribly wounded stranger: conspirator!

Nick Vogt, who lost his legs serving his country: conspirator!

Parents of children who were murdered at Sandy Hook, police officers who responded, paramedics and EMTs, doctors and nurses at emergency rooms, members of the media who covered the story, morticians who handled the victims’ bodies: all conspirators!

And while they’re making broad accusations based on zero evidence or even understanding of basic reality, they’re simultaneously branding anyone who disagrees as deluded, “Zionist slaves”, “sheeple”, lemmings or pawns of the government. THEY WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND USE TONS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS BECAUSE THEY THINK SCREAMING MAKES THEIR POINTS MORE VALID!!!!! And they long for the day that aaaallllll the conspiracies they just know are true will be revealed. So that everyone will have to look to them and say, “Holy cow, conspiracy theorist! Even though you know jack-shit about real investigations, even though everything you ‘know’ comes from stupid internet articles on conspiracy web sites, you were actually right about everything all along! I bow down to you, oh great one!”

But I have to admit something. Conspiracy theorists do in fact reveal important truths. Unfortunately for them, those truths are only about what goes on inside their own minds. They have nothing at all to do with the reality of Sandy Hook, the Boston Bombing or any other conspiracy truthers so desperately want to believe in.

http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/02/26/sandy-hook-massacre-contrived-event-says-former-state-trooper-wolfgang-halbig/

This man, Wolfgang Halbig, released an interview in which he listed numerous pieces of evidence which “prove” the event was fabricated. Halbig is a former state trooper and customs agent, plus a onetime educator and apparently a school safety official in Seminole County, Florida. His claims are inflaming those who already believed Sandy Hook was a hoax and pushing those on the fence into the conspiracy camp.

If Halbig’s bio has been reported correctly, it’s pretty impressive. One would think Halbig knows what he’s talking about. If I hadn’t read his list of supposed holes in the story, I might’ve thought he understood school shootings. I’ve Googled Halbig and seen many websites citing his claims, but no refutation from him; in other words, as far as I can tell he did say the Sandy Hook massacre never happened. If he did say that, he’s an idiot; impressive background or not, Halbig doesn’t seem to know the least bit about the realities of school shootings.

Now, a little about me. I’m not a school shooting expert. But I am a 20 year police officer who spent most of my time on night shift patrol in rough areas. I served several years as an adjunct Active Shooter instructor, teaching other officers how to respond to mass shootings. As an instructor I attended advanced active shooter training and played the role of the suspect in numerous exercises. I’m also a 25 year veteran of the Marine Reserve and Army National Guard, and served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have a pretty good background in tactics and a decent appreciation of the dynamics of mass shootings.

I’m going to address Halbig’s list of supposed Sandy Hook inaccuracies one by one. I’d ask you to consider my points, compare my background with Halbig’s, and decide for yourself if Halbig’s claims hold any water.

HALBIG’S LIST OF CLAIMS, AND MY REFUTATIONS

Point 1: “When the police arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School (SHES) that morning, they parked ¼ mile from the school’s front door instead of doing what first responders are supposed to do in an active shooter event, which is to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible so as to save as many lives as possible.”

When the official Sandy Hook report was released, I also heard rumors of officers parking a quarter mile away. But some of the responding officers have publicly stated they stopped in the school parking lot, rather than a faraway safe spot.

“They made it in under three minutes, arriving in the parking lot while gunfire could still be heard. ‘I got out of the car and grabbed my rifle and it stopped for a second,’ Officer Chapman said. ‘But then we heard more popping. You could tell it was rifle fire. And it was up so close, it sounded like it was coming from outside. So we were all looking around for someone to shoot back at.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/nyregion/horrors-of-newtown-shooting-scene-are-slow-to-fade.html

Are those officers lying? I highly doubt it. I’ve worked for three police departments, two tiny and one which was among the largest in the country. I’ve also worked with police officers from all over the world as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. One thing I know about the vast majority of American cops: when shots are being fired, we charge toward them. One of the proudest moments of my police career occurred in Kosovo. A local police officer was shot at a hotel, and frantic radio reports rang out. I sprinted toward the hotel. Officers from some other countries weren’t too eager to approach that hotel, and a few went the other way. But Americans charged straight into the danger, as I’ve seen them do over and over here in America. I don’t believe for a moment that police officers in Newtown, upon hearing reports of a school massacre, all chose to park a safe distance away.

Besides that, the official report says this: “Upon the receipt of the first 911 call, law enforcement was immediately dispatched to the school. It was fewer than four minutes from the time the first 911 call was received until the first police officer arrived at SHES. It was fewer than five minutes from the time the first 911 call was received until the shooter killed himself. It was fewer than six minutes from the time the first police officer arrived on SHES property to the time the first police officer entered the school building.”

Doesn’t sound to me like officers had to run a quarter mile from their cars to the school.

Point 2: “Paramedics and EMTs (emergency medical technicians) were not allowed to enter the school. Instead they were kept waiting in the Sandy Hook fire station nearby, 500 yards down the road from SHES.”

This is kind of a “Wow, no kidding” statement. EMS protocol has traditionally been to remain out of the immediate danger area until it’s been declared safe by law enforcement. So it’s believable that EMS wasn’t allowed into the school until police cleared it. Whether that was a bad call or not (I think it was), it’s not the least bit suspicious.

Point 3: “Trauma helicopters, which can provide the quickest and best medical services in an emergency, were not sent to Sandy Hook. Life Star, the medical helicopter service at Danbury Hospital’s Trauma Center, told Halbig ‘we were never called, never asked.’”

In decades as a cop, having been on many shootings, stabbings and major accidents, I can only recall medical helicopters being called in on a few occasions. Helicopters require cleared landing zones, which often means clearing traffic from vital roads. This can’t always be done in an urban area, or at least it can’t always be done quickly. Transportation by road is sometimes faster than by air, when the time needed to get the helicopters into the air, clear a landing zone and move casualties to the LZ is taken into account. Ground ambulances can usually get casualties to a closeby hospital before a helicopter can be brought in.

And there are only so many helicopters available. Even if they had been called, some (maybe most) of the casualties would have been transported by ground anyway.

Point 4: “Where were the ambulances to transport the wounded to hospitals?”

Didn’t he just answer his own question? The ambulances were at the Newtown fire station, as mentioned in point 2.

Point 5: “Why did police declare 26 people to be dead within the first 11 minutes of the shooting, when according to Connecticut law, only a doctor can declare someone to be legally dead?”

What difference does that make? I’ve been on plenty of scenes where cops declared someone “DRT”, meaning “Dead Right There”. That’s not an official pronouncement, it’s the officer reporting what’s obvious to him or her. I once found a man who had been dead in his house for at least a week, and I reported him dead on the radio. The man was badly decomposed, obviously dead, but someone else still had to make the official pronouncement. On another call we had someone decapitated by an air bag. Yes we called them dead, and yes someone else had to make the official pronouncement. That’s not suspicious, it’s just legal procedure.

Point 6: “Why did the FBI classify the Sandy Hook massacre? This has never been done before. Even the Columbine School massacre was not classified information. To this day, the FBI report on Sandy Hook remains classified information, not releasable to the public.”

I don’t know anything about the FBI’s report. I do know that the FBI’s report isn’t the determining factor in whether or not this incident really happened. Local and state officers responded and investigated, and their report has been released. Some of the responding officers have spoken publicly about the incident. Radio and 911 transcripts have been released. Parents have made statements. So if the FBI doesn’t release their report, suddenly the entire incident was faked?

Point 7: “Why did the State of Connecticut wait ELEVEN whole months to issue its official final report on the Sandy Hook shootings to the American public? Note that the final report does not include the FBI’s still-classified report.”

Why did the investigation take eleven months? Probably because it was extremely complicated, with two murder scenes, one of which was more complex than any those officers had previously encountered. And that each of the twenty-seven murders had to be individually and exhaustively detailed. And that there was no rush to finish, because there was nobody alive to prosecute, so no concern about a “speedy trial”. And that the investigators knew their report would be torn apart by legions of “truthers” intent on exploiting anything from typographical errors to 30-second timeline mistakes.

So officers took a long time to issue a report on one of the worst tragedies America has ever experienced? It’s a conspiracy! And what would have happened if they had issued the report quickly? “Truthers” would have considered that evidence the entire incident was pre-planned, with the report written beforehand.

Point 8: “Police transmissions don’t lie because they are made by sworn and trained law enforcement officers. On the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, recorded police transmissions said ‘We have multiple weapons inside the [SH] classroom — a rifle and a shotgun.’ But nobody could find the shotgun in the school. Instead, a shotgun was found in the black Honda parked outside the school.”

Oh, brother. This statement makes me question Halbig’s exalted background as a police officer. Any cop who has been on more than one dangerous, adrenaline-charged scene knows officers make mistakes. Suspects are misidentified. People see things that aren’t really there. Cops call out bad directions (I was famous for that). Someone yells something that turns out to not be true and others repeat it. How many officers have reported seeing a weapon, suspicious object, suspicious person or whatever, and later found out they were wrong? Does anyone recall the search for the nonexistent third suspect at the North Hollywood Shootout?

A friend of mine arrived on a disturbance one night. Within seconds of arriving he was on the radio saying, “We really need an ambulance. I have a guy here with his eyeball hanging out, I think he’s been shot in the head.” When I arrived the ambulance was leaving, just as officers entered an apartment searching for the suspect. One of the officers had a shotgun. We found the suspect, and determined he had kicked the victim repeatedly in the head with cowboy boots. No gun was involved.

I went to the hospital to check on the victim. The paramedics who transported him not only told the emergency room staff that the victim had been shot in the head, but that “shots were still being fired when we were leaving the scene.” When I found the victim in a shock room, a doctor was standing over him explaining to a group of doctors in training, “Looks like the entry wound is here and exit is here. We’re going to treat him with [etc. etc.]”. I told the doctor he hadn’t been shot, he had been kicked in the head. The doctor was surprised. Later he told me I was right, there was no gunshot wound. And what the officer thought was an eyeball was actually a flap of forehead skin that had been torn free and was hanging over the victim’s face.

When I talked to the paramedics later, it turned out one of them had spread the “they were shooting as we left” story. He just got scared; he had a patient who looked like he had been shot, he saw officers with pistols and a shotgun going into an apartment, and perceived something that simply didn’t happen. Paramedics are just as professional as cops, just as interested in determining facts. But this one made a gigantic mistake, which was then repeated by several other people including a doctor. Professionals screw up sometimes.

I haven’t heard the radio traffic about two weapons, but if it happened, so what? I’m not the least bit surprised an officer called out something that turned out to be incorrect. It happens all the time. And it’s usually a result of adrenaline, fear, confusion, conflicting witness reports and everything else that cops encounter at high-stress scenes. If Halbig doesn’t know that, then I suspect that during his time as a “cop” he rode a desk far more than a patrol car.

Besides that, it’s pretty damn ridiculous for Halbig to cite the professionalism of police officers while simultaneously accusing every police officer involved in the Sandy Hook investigation of being part of this “conspiracy”.

Point 9: “At 9:45 AM that day, a police officer found a surviving kindergarten-aged girl in the hallway. The officer sent her back into Room 8 — a crime scene with students and teachers shot dead. What police officer would do that?”

Probably an officer who thought, “The room we just searched is clear, but the rest of the school isn’t. I don’t have extra people around to guard this girl or take her to safety. And there may be a suspect still loose in the school. So I should send her back into a safe room, and report her location on the radio.” Ordering her back into that room was probably the best bad option out of a list of bad options.

This comment reminds me of a debate I had before I deployed to Iraq. According to traditional military doctrine, you never, under any circumstances, evacuated a wounded soldier with a dead soldier. In the early years of the Iraq War some soldiers tried to hold on to that doctrine. But it didn’t always make sense. If a Humvee was hit by an IED and all the crewmen were killed or wounded, and they were under small arms fire, it wouldn’t make sense to have other soldiers make multiple trips into the kill zone when they can evacuate everyone at once. You make one trip in, load everyone you can, and get out. Sometimes war just sucks, and you have to do what you have to do.

In active shooter situations, we expect to step over the dead and ignore wounded who are screaming in agony and begging for help. We can expect some of those wounded to be women and children. The first officers on scene have to focus on finding the shooter and stopping the killing; if that means we have to send a little girl into a room full of dead people because it’s the only safe place, that’s what we have to do. In a situation where everything sucks, sometimes we have to make the least sucky decision. That’s the brutal reality.

Point 10: “Similarly, that morning, two Connecticut state troopers entered Room 10 and found an unharmed boy hiding in the bathroom. The troopers ordered the boy to stay in the room — a room with dead people. ‘That’s not police protocol.’”

See my above comment. Sure, that’s not protocol. So what? Does Halbig, with his alleged police background, think cops or anyone else always follow protocol? Amazingly enough, sometimes people don’t exactly follow the training they’ve received. I’m sure everyone reading this would be shocked – shocked! – to hear that teenagers still drive like idiots even after being taught not to. Or that soldiers don’t always hit their targets even after extensive marksmanship training. Or that cops, in the most terrifying, intense, chaotic, confusing scene they’ve ever been on, when they’re experiencing survival stress reactions like tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, time speeding up or slowing down, enhanced visual acuity and loss of manual dexterity, might not follow their training to the letter.

Cops are human. I can pretty much guarantee that none of officers at Newtown had responded to anything like the Sandy Hook massacre before. In the heat of the moment, they didn’t exactly follow protocol. Surprised? Me neither.

Point 11: “’Having investigated and given expert testimony on many school shootings, Halbig says ‘I know what tears look like.’ But the parents of slain Sandy Hook children, as we’ve noted here on FOTM, did not cry. (In the now famous case of Robbie Parker, the father of allegedly slain 6-year-old Emilie, he went from laughing and joking to pretending to choke back tears in the blink of an eye.)”

No joke? Not a single parent of a murdered child from Sandy Hook cried? Who the hell are these people then?

And I’d like to know how Halbig or anyone else knows the parent mentioned above was “pretending to choke back tears”. I’ve been around plenty of family members of murder victims, and it’s not unusual for them to go through intense mood swings.

Point 12: “Sandy Hook’s medical examiner Dr. Wayne Carver refused to let the parents see the bodies of their slain children, and instead gave them photos of the bodies, which is ‘unheard of.’ Halbig knows about the inconsolable grief of parents and is himself a parent. Parents whose children had been shot dead ‘would kick the door down’ demanding to see the bodies.”

I’ve never been on a scene where family members were allowed to see the bodies of murder victims. When the bodies are still where they fell, the area around them needs to remain as undisturbed as possible in order to preserve evidence. Until a body is examined and autopsied, the body itself is evidence that needs to be preserved. People not involved in the investigation aren’t allowed to see murder victims at will, they generally won’t see the body until it’s released to a funeral home after the autopsy.

And reasonable people don’t go kicking doors down to see dead bodies. Yes, I’ve been involved in a murder investigation where a mob did try to reach a dead body at an emergency room, and I know of another case where a mob chased a hearse with a dead accident victim to a funeral home. Neither of those cases involved reasonable people. I’ve been on many other murder scenes where family members patiently followed our every instruction, even if they were distraught.

Point 13: “Why was Sandy Hook Elementary School torn down? This is not the case with any of the other schools where shootings had taken place, including Columbine School.”

In this case, the community decided they didn’t want to continue using the school where 20 children and 6 educators were murdered. I don’t find that particularly surprising. Columbine High School wasn’t torn down, but its library, where the majority of victims died, was walled off.

Point 14: “Who installed the new security system at SHES? This should be a matter of public record.”

If it was a contract made by the city, then I imagine it is a matter of public record. What difference does that make? The security system didn’t enable or stop the massacre, and the school’s locked doors were an easily surmountable obstacle to Lanza. If we don’t know who installed the security system, does that signify something?

Point 15: “The shooting-to-death of 26 people would leave 45-60 gallons of blood. Who cleaned it up? What biohazard company was hired to clean the crime scene?”

Wait…what? According to medicinenet.com, a 150-pound body contains approximately 5.5 quarts of blood. With 26 victims that’s 143 quarts. Four quarts make a gallon, so 143 quarts of blood equals 35.75 gallons. And that’s if they were all adults. Children’s bodies hold less blood.

But that doesn’t matter, because when people are shot to death all their blood doesn’t automatically drain from their bodies. Halbig has either never been on a shooting murder scene or he’s completely forgotten what they look like. People bleed out because they have massive injuries and their hearts pump blood out from those injuries. When the heart stops pumping, the blood loss stops. I’ve seen some big pools of blood, but other than in a few serial murderer cases never heard of a murder victim being totally drained of blood.

Yes, that would have been a hell of a mess to clean up, even without the mythical “45-60 gallons of blood”. Was it cleaned up afterward? I don’t know. The school was never reopened, so did it need to be cleaned?

Point 16: “Why is there not even one lawsuit by a Sandy Hook parent against SHES for negligence? Halbig has never ever seen a school shooting without parents suing the school for negligence.”

Is it possible the parents really don’t blame the school for the mentally ill murderer who shot his way through locked doors, killed educators who tried to save their children, then murdered as many people as he could before shooting himself?

Point 17: “Why are there so many fund-raisers for the Sandy Hook shootings? Halbig: ‘I’ve never seen so many fund-raisers’ in the case of Sandy Hook. One fundraising alone, by United Way, netted $17 million, from which ‘every [SH] parent got a big chunk of money.’”

Okay. People donated funds to assist families whose children were brutally murdered. Obviously the incident never happened, because the United Way and others raised money. This proves that United Way was involved in the conspiracy.

I’m just not seeing a reason to throw out a conspiracy flag because Americans raised money to help families who had just suffered unimaginable tragedy.

Point 18: “Alleged shooter Adam Lanza, 20, is said to have Asperger syndrome — a high-functioning (in academics) form of austism. Halbig points out, however, that like those with autism, children with Asperger have ‘very very poor motor skills’ and ‘very poor muscle tone.’ How did Asperger-afflicted Adam Lanza with ‘very poor muscle tone’ carry a rifle, a shotgun, a handgun, and bullets? How did Asperger-afflicted Adam Lanza with ‘very very poor motor skills’ shoot 26 people dead — not wounded — in less than five minutes, firing one bullet roughly every two seconds?”

Unfortunately, I know a lot about autism. My youngest son is moderately autistic. Anyone who thinks everyone on the autism spectrum is affected the same doesn’t understand autism. Yes, some people with autism have poor muscle tone and poor motor skills. That doesn’t mean they can’t operate a weapon. My five year old son could probably hold and fire a rifle (his motor skills are just fine, by the way). There is no reason to believe Lanza was so weak physically that he couldn’t operate a rifle, or carry spare ammunition.

And does Halbig, who is supposed to be such an expert on school shootings, really think anyone needs real weapon-handling skills to murder a bunch of unarmed children? All they need to do is operate the weapon. Unarmed children, especially kindergarteners, aren’t going to do anything more than run or hide. Many would probably freeze in disbelief. Unarmed adults aren’t real hard to kill either, as we’ve seen in many active shooter incidents. Shooting defenseless, terrified people at close range doesn’t require Delta Force skills or even average physical strength.

Besides that, we already know children with little strength can operate an “assault rifle”. We’ve seen pictures and videos of it.

Halbig’s conclusions: “’In my professional opinion [as a school safety consultant], I suspect Sandy Hook was a scripted event that took place, in the planning for two or 2½ years.’…Halbig does not believe any child was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.”

Halbig sounds like a typical “truther”; he assumes our government, the same government absolutely incapable of even putting a health care website together, can pull off a gigantic conspiracy requiring thousands of willing participants. And these participants wouldn’t all be shadowy, ghostlike federal government Jason Bourne spies, either. Local cops and firefighters, the very people who serve and live in the small community where the massacre was “staged”, would have to willingly lie to the entire nation about it. Children who attended the school would have to lie. All the teachers would have to lie. Local officials would have to willingly play along with a narrative they know is false. People who live near the school would have to lie about hearing gunfire and having children knocking on their doors asking for help. And all these various disparate people, all the cops, firefighters, paramedics, doctors, neighbors, parents, reporters, all the thousands of people associated with the incident, are all in on the conspiracy? They were all part of this “scripted event”, they all knew in advance it was fake? Or did they spontaneously jump into the conspiracy at the first opportunity?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure many people did immediately recognize an opportunity to exploit the tragedy for political gain. Some of them doubtless believe in the morality of their cause, some others probably see it as a way to consolidate their own or their party’s power. But exploiting a tragedy isn’t the same thing as faking it.

The bottom line for me is that I don’t believe a bunch of regular, everyday Americans are lying about this. Why would they? Why would guys just like the cops I’ve served with for decades, teachers like my mom, sister and wife, and paramedics like the guys I’ve seen frantically trying to save strangers on many scenes, willingly lie about this? According to Halbig and every truther who agrees with him, not a single child died at Sandy Hook that day. So every cop on that scene lied about dead children they knew weren’t there. Every paramedic who claimed to have treated a victim knows there were no victims. Every neighbor who reported hearing gunfire knows not a shot was fired. Everyone who worked at Sandy Hook, every student there, knows nobody was murdered. But they’re all in on the lie anyway. Because they all passionately want gun control. Or something like that.

Halbig is reportedly going to travel to Newtown himself, so he can ask questions “eyeball to eyeball”. I’d highly suggest he carry a first aid kit. Because if I had lost a son or daughter at Sandy Hook, and some “truther” came around accusing me of lying about the brutal murder of my own child, I know exactly how I’d react.

Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com, Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).

But at least there were no armed teachers there to “add to the carnage”. Who knows how much worse those tragedies would have been if a teacher had shot back? Thank God, nobody resisted. When a murderous coward is shooting dozens of innocent children, the best thing to do is to let him keep doing it until police arrive. ALLOWING TWENTY-SIX CHILDREN AND TEACHERS TO BE BRUTALLY MURDERED IS BETTER THAN LETTING EVEN ONE TEACHER SHOOT BACK.

In case you didn’t catch it, I’m being sarcastic.

Let’s make something clear. NOBODY is proposing that we “arm teachers” against their will. This was obvious from day one of the debate, but the narrative seemed to be “those pro-gun idiots want to force teachers to carry weapons in schools”. Whether this “misunderstanding” of the proposal was an honest mistake, or an intentional effort to (again) discredit and smear gun rights advocates, is anyone’s guess.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, in an article titled Teacher Union President: plan to arm teachers ‘dangerous, irresponsible’, said, “. . . the NRA is rushing to arm teachers and rushing to arm schools. . . We actually need to make kids safer. We actually need to take guns away from kids.”

This is an amazing statement from someone who should know better. Rather than “rushing to arm teachers”, the NRA wants armed guards in schools, which isn’t the best option but is still better than nothing. And their plan would in fact make kids safer. Laws that already ban murderers from carrying guns into schools obviously aren’t working.

What has been proposed is allowing teachers to carry weapons in schools if they choose, are eligible and pass required qualification courses. A school that allows teachers to carry wouldn’t look any different than others, except for maybe having a sign advertising “Teachers in this school may be armed”. Just as potential airplane hijackers have to factor in the possibility of being shot by a Federal Air Marshal, an aspiring mass murderer would have to factor in the possibility of encountering multiple armed teachers.

Allowing teachers to carry isn’t an amazing or revolutionary idea. Nor is it the lunacy that some people, many of whom probably have little to no experience with guns and violence, claim it to be. As a longtime cop and former Active Shooter instructor who trained officers how to respond to mass shootings, I’m pretty familiar with the school shooting problem. As far as I’m concerned, armed teachers are the only realistic solution.

As I mentioned before, some have proposed putting armed guards or more police officers on campus, and that’s definitely better than nothing. But we’d still face the problem of not enough guards, not in the right place, not at the right time. Many modern high schools are about the size of an Afghan village, with ten times the population. The likelihood that an armed guard would happen to be right where a shooter begins his attack are pretty low. Most school shooters weren’t stupid; they would probably have selected an area without visible armed security anyway.

The high school my daughter attended is huge, with several buildings, activities halls and athletic fields. The student population is around 4000. If I and another police officer were in the main parking lot and received a call that an active shooter was inside, there would still be a built-in response time. If he was in an easily accessible, known location like the cafeteria, we could probably get there in a minute or two; but if he was, for example, “near classroom A217, second floor of the east wing of building C, heading north to the stairwell”, who knows how long it would take us to reach him and stop the killing.

Uniformed police or armed security guards can’t be everywhere. An attack that begins in an area without an armed guard present can go on for several minutes before police arrive. Believe me, “several minutes” is a long time when someone’s shooting at you. Even in the best case scenario, if my partner and I take only a minute to find and neutralize the shooter, he still has sixty seconds to spray helpless students with gunfire. This doesn’t sound acceptable to me.

Teacher Federation President Weingarten also said, in the same interview, “In Columbine there was an armed guard, it didn’t help. In Virginia Tech there were armed guards across the campus, it didn’t help”. On these points, she was right (thank you for making my point for me, Ms. Weingarten). A school resource officer was on the Columbine High School campus when the shooting started, and did briefly exchange gunfire with one shooter outside the school.

However, when the shooter fled into the school, the officer didn’t follow. This wasn’t because the officer experienced a failure of will; rather, previous training dictated that he should “back off, set up a perimeter and call SWAT”. The officer followed that training, which hindsight showed was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Once the shooters entered the school, they were completely unopposed. They had free rein to do whatever they wished, with no worry whatsoever about armed resistance. They even took water breaks. Had armed teachers been inside Columbine High School, circumstances would have been very different.

At Virginia Tech, numerous police officers from two agencies were already on campus when the massacre began. They were there because Seung-Hui Cho, the murderer, first killed two students about two hours before the killing spree at Norris Hall. With police already on campus, and a response time of three minutes to reach Norris Hall, Cho still managed to kill thirty students and teachers before police entered the building (I should point out that I also support concealed carry on college campuses). So Weingarten was correct, armed security or police on campus may not be able to stop a massacre.

However, armed teachers CAN stop a massacre. This isn’t because teachers are tactical geniuses with years of gunfighting experience; it’s because armed teachers would be there, when the killing starts, with means and motivation to do something about it. There is no built-in lag time for a teacher response, as there is for police response. Teachers are, at worst, yards away. And even if a teacher would never hurt a fly in self-defense, I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t act to defend their students.

This isn’t to say a teacher (or cop, or firearms instructor, or Navy SEAL) would have an easy time stopping an active shooter. A mass school shooting is just about the worst nightmare scenario any of us could ever face, and handling it properly wouldn’t be easy. Because of this reality, reasonable people often say, “in a situation like that, with innocent people running in panic everywhere, a teacher would just shoot the wrong person”.

Maybe so. But in an active shooter situation, a murderer is killing innocent people. A teacher might kill an innocent person. It’s not better to just let the murderer keep shooting people. And while a teacher may encounter mass chaos that nobody could effectively respond to, I’d like you to consider this more likely situation:

Teacher is in his/her classroom. Teacher hears shots. Teacher looks into the hall and sees students fleeing in terror, with a man firing a weapon behind them. Teacher closes door and orders students into the safest part of the room. Teacher draws a weapon from under his/her jacket and covers the door from ten feet away. Shooter opens door. Teacher empties a magazine into shooter from close range. Massacre has been stopped.

Before anyone accuses me of engineering a hypothetical just to prove my point, please read about Professor Liviu Librescu. He was shot and killed while holding his classroom door closed in Norris Hall, trying to keep Seung-Hui Cho out. And read about a teacher named Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. She and a student died while trying, and failing, to barricade a door that Cho eventually forced his way through. And read about the two teachers in the Columbine High School library. They had plenty of advance warning, but could do nothing except hide and call the police as the two shooters entered. Imagine how differently the two massacres might have ended if those teachers had stood by the doors with weapons to defend their students.

Those who oppose armed teachers seem to have apocalyptic visions of untrained educators firing blindly at hulking, armored, machine-gun-toting monsters surrounded by innocent children. They don’t imagine a teacher carefully returning fire at a childish coward who has no skill or training, which is what most mass shooters truly are. They imagine armed teachers to be a group of old, overweight wanna-be’s who look more like Keystone Kops than Special Forces. But they don’t imagine a teacher locking down her classroom just like an unarmed teacher would, but now resolutely standing by the door, ready to fire on the shooter if he enters. They don’t picture the brave assistant principal in Pearl, Mississippi who confronted and detained a mass shooter, without firing even one round. Apparently, opponents of armed teachers don’t picture anything that doesn’t support their viewpoint.

This so-called “debate” about allowing teachers to carry should be over already. We have, for decades, had laws that prohibit weapons in schools. Those laws worked fine until suicidal, murderous cowards decided they didn’t care about almighty words on paper. Since the Columbine attack, which ushered in the current era of mass school shootings, the prohibition on armed teachers has done nothing but help murderers cause repeated, needless tragedies.

We’ve tried having unarmed teachers; that policy has failed, and failed miserably, in every single instance it’s been tested. Let’s kick our national addiction to failure. Let’s stop doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. From this point on, let’s do what’s right for our children. Let’s allow armed teachers to defend them.

This time the murderer outdid most others, and his victims were younger than usual. But all the other factors were depressingly predictable: an unstable man, semiautomatic weapons, helpless victims with no defense other than hope. As is often the case, the murderer committed suicide rather than fight the police or face justice. As usual, we see gut-wrenching video of parents crying out in unimaginable grief, police officers with heavy body armor and assault rifles maneuvering around a school as if it were an enemy bunker, and crime scene tape roping off areas where hidden dead lay.

And we see, in every case, calls from well-meaning people for something to be done, anything, to protect the innocent. They demand mandatory visitor sign-ins at schools, cameras, metal detectors, “gun free zones”, and of course, restrictions on firearms. These ideas and measures aren’t new, and aren’t effective (we’ve now learned that the Newtown shooter simply shot his way through Sandy Hook Elementary’s locked doors). After a mass murder, students or patrons are made to feel safer with expensive but empty displays of improved security. Those warning signs, cameras, new laws or metal detectors rarely improve safety.

Now I’ll ask you to put yourself in the shoes of an intended victim of an active shooter.

You’re having lunch with your family at a mall food court. It’s a pleasant afternoon, no different than any other day you’ve visited the mall. Bored, unarmed security guards on Segways patrol the walkways. You barely notice them as your family discusses your son’s upcoming school play.

Adrenaline saturates your blood. You force yourself not to panic because you know your family needs you now, more than ever. You grab your children and pull them close. A desperate thought crosses your mind, and you know it’s fantasy even as you think it.

Is someone making a movie or something?

Ten feet away, a woman and child are huddled under their table. The woman screams, “We’ve got to get out of here! Oh my God, we’ve got to get out of here!”

You look to the shooter. Less than twenty feet away. He takes another step in your direction. You don’t know if he’s seen your family yet, but if he hasn’t, he will soon. You close your eyes, say a prayer to your God, and make your decision.

I’d like you to ask yourself a question about the situation I just described: what measures could have protected you and your family?

Cameras? No, video just helps with the investigation after the fact. Metal detectors? Maybe they would have deterred the man from choosing that mall, but let’s be realistic. Malls aren’t going to put metal detectors at every entrance, they’re not going to become mini-airports with customers waiting an hour in line to get in. They’d lose all their business.

What about the “gun free zone” sign on the wall? That obviously didn’t work. People who plan on committing mass murder followed by suicide could care less about getting in trouble for illegally carrying a gun. Unarmed mall cops? They can call the police, but that’s about it. Gun control? As I heard a wise man say recently, “That genie is already out of the bottle”. Making new laws won’t eliminate guns already out there.

What about calling the police yourself? As a cop, I can tell you the phrase, “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away”, isn’t a joke. Unless one of us happens to be right there when the shooting starts, the first officers will arrive several minutes later to find many citizens murdered and one coward dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

So what is the only realistic defense available to you and your family? Armed, trained citizens. Hopefully, many armed, trained citizens. Armed citizens who can be anywhere, unlike the limited supply of police and security guards.

Much of the American public will have a knee-jerk reaction against this idea. People will say, “How can you expect a civilian to go up against some heavily armed, psychotic killer? Civilians aren’t trained for that.”

Maybe they’re not, but they’re there, with a gun. A half-trained guy with a weapon who is on scene and ready to take action immediately is worth more than a highly-trained SWAT team that arrives thirty minutes later. If you’re under the food court table watching as a murderer approaches your family, would you prefer to wait five minutes for the first patrol officer to arrive? Or would you rather have some fifty year old used car salesman with a concealed handgun license attack the murderer before he reaches you? I’ll take the car salesman over the cop, because the car salesman is there when I need him.

Aside from that, we should keep in mind that most active shooters aren’t well trained. No special training is needed to shoot defenseless people. We’ve seen evidence in many shootings that the murderers really didn’t know how to handle weapons. In Aurora, Colorado and Portland, Oregon, the shooters opened fire with military-style weapons and then had no idea what to do when the weapons malfunctioned. In both of those cases, they just dropped the rifles. One of the Columbine shooters used his very cool-looking, sawed off, pistol grip shotgun to kill one victim. When he fired it, the weapon recoiled, hit him in the face and broke his nose. This isn’t the mark of a skilled shooter. We shouldn’t act like active shooters are Delta Force ninjas. Many can barely operate a weapon, and all are cowards.

I’ve used the term “coward” several times, and I don’t think the importance of this fact can be overstated. These people are the epitome of cowardice. They don’t want to fight anyone; they want to murder people who can’t fight back. Shooting a bunch of unarmed people might take nerve but not bravery.

Typically, these murderers commit suicide as soon as they’re confronted. The Newtown shooter apparently shot himself as soon as he heard sirens. One of the Columbine shooters traded shots with a police officer outside the school, then ran away; both shooters shot themselves before police made entry. Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech murderer, shot himself as soon as he heard police officers enter the building. What is the likelihood that the typical active shooter will fold as soon as an armed citizen opens fire on him? My gut reaction is that it’s pretty high.

But people will still object to the idea of armed citizens responding to active shooters. Another issue that will be raised is, “If private citizens try to fight back against an active shooter, they might accidentally shoot an innocent person. So they shouldn’t try it.”

They’re partly correct. There is a chance a civilian could shoot an innocent person in the confusion of an active shooter incident. A highly trained police officer might make that mistake too (remember the recent New York City shooting?). However, you’ll have a hard time convincing me that’s worse than allowing a murderer to fire dozens of rounds into a mass of innocent people.

Let’s invent a series of seven hypothetical active shooter situations. In each situation, ten people are murdered. That’s seventy victims. Now, let’s inject an armed citizen into each situation. The armed citizens manage to stop the killing after three people are murdered. That’s twenty-one victims. Now let’s say the armed citizens accidentally kill an innocent person in every situation. That’s twenty-one victims killed by the murderer, plus seven killed accidentally by the armed citizens. Twenty-eight victims total, versus seventy.

Granted, this is a hypothetical. But I think it illustrates my point well enough. Even with a possible additional risk of friendly fire, it’s still better for armed citizens to respond to active shooters.

We recently heard a public sports figure claim that had he been in the Aurora, Colorado theater during that shooting, he would have preferred to have been unarmed rather than shoot back. This is because “fighting back would have just added to the carnage”. I cannot even begin to understand this thinking. A man walks into a theater and opens fire into the crowd with an assault rifle, and shooting back would somehow make things worse? Is it better to just allow the murderer to keep shooting innocents until the police show up, or he runs out of ammo, or gets bored and stops firing? What about the basic right we all have to defend ourselves, and our families? What about doing what any real, brave man or woman would do, stepping up to defend the defenseless?

Next objection: “We can’t tell civilians to fight back against active shooters. If there are two guys with guns running around, how are the police supposed to know who the bad guy is when they arrive?”

Fair point. We cops won’t know who the bad guy is when we arrive. But we do know not to assume that everyone with a gun is a bad guy. We train for that. We understand that we may encounter off-duty cops in plain clothes, armed civilians, security guards, even people carrying illegally but still trying to help. We may make a mistake and engage the wrong person. That’s the reality of lethal, armed encounters, and there’s no way to eliminate that risk. But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t take action to defend themselves, their families and innocent people around them.

I’ve attended several Law Enforcement Active Shooter training courses, and was an assistant instructor for a few years. In addition to helping teach many classes, I also had the opportunity to participate in advanced training scenarios, and to play the role of an active shooter in numerous training exercises. I’m no expert on how to deal with an active shooter, and there are police officers who will disagree with me; however, in all the training I attended and instructed, I never saw a single reason why armed citizens can’t effectively respond to an active shooter.

This subject requires a 500 page research paper to fully explore, and I won’t inflict that on you. However, I’d like to leave you with some final thoughts.

We see pathetic cowardice from murderers in every active shooter incident. We don’t need to see cowardice disguised as virtue from the intended victims. Refusing to take action against a brutal murderer isn’t “exercising good sense”; it’s relying on nothing more than hope. We’ve seen that hope fail in tragedy after tragedy.

Someone once said, “Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it’s the only answer.” When a coward opens fire on a crowd of innocent people, new laws and passive measures have failed; immediate, massive violence returned toward that coward is the only answer. The only people who can inflict that violence are those right there, in his path.

My dream is that committing mass murder becomes too dangerous of a proposition for anyone to even consider it. My dream is that the American public stops putting responsibility for their own lives into someone else’s hands. My dream is that every useless loser who thinks he’ll “be somebody” by carrying out a massacre changes his mind, because he knows he’ll be shot down like a rabid dog within seconds of trying it. My dream is to see multiple armed citizens mow down every sorry excuse for a human being who tries to commit a mass murder. In the end, this righteous response is the only thing that will end the threat from these cowards.

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