Outspoken Polk County, Florida Sheriff Grady Judd minced no words in explaining how he would respond to an active shooter and how an MSNBC columnist criticizing the idea of arming teachers didn’t know what he was talking about.
MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem wrote in a column titled “The Texas Shooting Shows the Futility of Arming Teachers,” “While all the details of the shooting are not yet clear, authorities’ accounts revealed that the gunman was confronted by multiple armed police officers, yet they were unable to stop him before he killed nearly two dozen people.”
“MSNBC doesn’t know so much about what they’re talking about — but that’s not unusual. If they did, they could create the training program, and we’d never have another active shooter,” Judd snapped on Fox News.
“At the end of the day we know that shootings, these active shooters, are done between zero and five minutes,” he argued as he spoke of arming teachers. “The police response is plus five minutes.”
“We also know that active shooters don’t get to change it to a barricade situation,” he said. “When you go in shooting, even though you pause, it doesn’t mean there aren’t injured children or people lying there. Once an active shooter, always an active shooter. Push in, save lives, neutralize the threat. We train for that; we expect that.”
“I can tell you this,” he said bluntly. “I want them to shoot them, shoot them so much that you can read the local newspaper through them. Neutralize the threat.”
“At the end of the day, as simple as it may sound, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Judd asserted. “There needs to be multiple people on that campus in advance, well-trained, that’s prepared to and can go in and stop the threat.”
Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton championed the idea of arming teachers after the Uvalde, Texas school shooting.
“First responders typically can’t get there in time to prevent a shooting, it’s just not possible unless they have a police officer on camera on every campus, which for a lot of these schools is almost impossible,” he stated. “I think you’re gonna have to do more at the school, because it typically involves very short periods of time, and you have to have people trained on campus to react.”
Speaking on Fox News, he said, “The reality is, we don’t have the resources to have law enforcement at every school. It takes time for law enforcement, no matter how prepared, no matter how good they are to get there. So, having the right training for some of these people at the school is the best hope.”