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| And welcome back. | |
| Our guest tonight is David Threatt, superintendent for Harold ISD in northern Texas. | |
| We'll be talking to him about teachers carrying firearms in the classroom. | |
| He joins us now via Skype. | |
| Thanks for joining us, David. | |
| Thanks a lot. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| Now, before we get into the teachers at your district carrying firearms in the classroom, at least being able to have that option, this recent shooting, the Sandy Hook, what was your first thoughts when you heard about that last week? | |
| Yeah, it was sick. | |
| I mean, you know, nobody with any amount of humanity can hear that kind of thing and just not be saddened that somebody would have the The evil intent to be able to hurt little kids like that. | |
| I just couldn't believe it. | |
| It was very heartbreaking. | |
| Now, speaking of teachers carrying firearms in the classroom, how long has that been allowed in your district and what actually prompted your decision to do that? | |
| Well, we passed the policy in October of 2007. | |
| And we have passive security, we have the cameras, we have the electronic magnetic doors, exterior doors, and restricted access. | |
| But two things caused it. | |
| The first one was October 2006 with the Pennsylvania Amish shootings. | |
| That was a milk delivery man. | |
| uh... who broke in and and uh... because that uh... those those deaths | |
| we would have found a gun past our security we would have let him in the door anything that was in april | |
| of those seven and that was of course virginia tech | |
| right now what's disturbing about that was that uh... | |
| their plan was to lock the doors and you know and hide And that didn't stop him. | |
| He was able to shoot those doors open. | |
| And then, what, 60 casualties and 30 some odd dead? | |
| Right. | |
| That was very disturbing. | |
| Every one of the plans in the United States in schools, emergency plans, are to lock the doors and hide the kids. | |
| Well, that was disturbing to us because we're 30 minutes from law enforcement. | |
| We had no way to protect ourselves, and there wasn't anybody around to take care of us. | |
| We were our first responders. | |
| Right. | |
| I came up with a plan, and the plan, you know, has been on the news a lot. | |
| It's pretty self-explanatory. | |
| They have to have a CHL. | |
| We approve them. | |
| The board approves them individually. | |
| We undergo some extra training, and then we use frangible ammunition, which, you know, breaks apart when it hits hard objects, to avoid ricochet. | |
| But the advantage of our plan is Is that we have multiple people within the school, within the building, that can respond. | |
| We don't just have one. | |
| You know, every plant out there is a security guard. | |
| Well, what happens when he goes to the dentist? | |
| What happens when he has the flu? | |
| What happens when he goes to lunch, for crying out loud? | |
| You see, every one of these things is predictable and targetable. | |
| And if you can take that target out, You know, these shootings will continue. | |
| You've got to have, first of all, like our plan, personnel anonymity. | |
| Nobody knows who has them. | |
| You're going to come to our school? | |
| You want to do damage? | |
| You are going to get some surprises. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Exactly right. | |
| Now, I guess you have anonymity. | |
| Do you just have an estimate about how many teachers carry or personnel carry in your schools? | |
| Yeah, we don't release that information. | |
| I would just say that it's sufficient, you know. | |
| We need redundancy, you know, and so if any individual happens to be, you know, taken out in an attack, they'll be back up. | |
| Right, and I definitely respect they're not trying to give away your trade secrets. | |
| Now I remember back when I was in school, it seems so long ago, but it probably wasn't. | |
| I remember our plan, as you spoke about, was to duck and hide and pretend like nobody was there in the middle of the school day. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, and it never made sense to me. | |
| Even one of my teachers, I remember, I'm not going to say her name because I think she still works there. | |
| She said, if anybody ever does attack the school, of course it's after Columbine and all that, she said, I'm going to bust out one of those windows, anybody wants to come with me can come with me. | |
| Because the plan was to lock the door and hide, turn out the lights, and you know, line up against the wall and hope that you didn't get shot. | |
| And you know, you're at midday school time, somebody knows that you're there, you can't hide and act like nobody's in the building. | |
| Yeah, I mean, you need some type of plan. | |
| So, now this plan, I guess, is working for your district. | |
| Do you think it's the teachers carrying something that could work nationwide? | |
| Yeah, I do. | |
| I mean, right off the bat, what we know about active shooters, they're not going where there's resistance. | |
| That's what we know about them. | |
| You know what? | |
| So if every school has resistance, they're not going there. | |
| But you know what? | |
| This wasn't necessary. | |
| We caused this trouble. | |
| This idea of making schools gun-free zones was somebody's brainstorm. | |
| And it was a stupid one. | |
| The idea of disarming and making some people basically unprotected across the nation was asinine at best. | |
| And so, all we're doing is responding to the situation and trying to fix what 22 years ago occurred. | |
| Right, that's exactly right. | |
| Now, do you have any kind of specifications on what type of firearms your staff can carry? | |
| Anything that they can't carry? | |
| Well, generally we have some guidelines on that so that we can, you know, share ballistics and stuff like that, and they need to be significant. | |
| So we do have, you know, we want to make sure that we have significant firepower. | |
| Okay. | |
| And you talked about concealed carry training. | |
| Do you have any other type of specialty training that your teachers need to go through before they're allowed to carry on campus? | |
| Yeah, we have some significant, I'll just call it that, and it mainly has to do with accuracy. | |
| We also do some room clearance, and we also do some hostage type situations, but mainly accuracy. | |
| That's the one thing we need to have. | |
| And I think that was borne out in the recent San Antonio shooting, | |
| I guess everyone's heard about that, in San Antonio Theater or whatever, | |
| when an off-duty deputy had her gun and shot the guy with one shot, you know? | |
| And that's very helpful whenever you're able to neutralize a threat with very little firepower. | |
| Now, recently we've heard a lot about regulations on firearms. | |
| We've heard Obama talk about it. | |
| We've heard about Mary Bloomberg talk about, you know, semi-automatic weapons. | |
| I'm guessing maybe one or two of your staff carries a semi-automatic. | |
| And of course, referring to the shooter, he had a semi-automatic rifle. | |
| You yourself, maybe getting away from the schools, do you see any need for restrictions on firearms of any type here in the U.S.? | |
| No. | |
| I mean, I don't think they have read the Second Amendment. | |
| I know they haven't. | |
| And this is what's causing all of this. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| If they don't like the Constitution, I think they should go to Russia or somewhere else. | |
| North Korea. | |
| As we've found out, he's fundamentally changing America, and this is what they want. | |
| And I've heard people say, it's not right. | |
| You know that the Constitution's outdated. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| It does work, and it can work. | |
| And you know what? | |
| You take away your freedoms, Yeah, don't tell me what to do. | |
| them back. Right. So you don't think anything like for a lot of people talk | |
| about nobody needs you know a black military style rifle to hunt or they | |
| don't need X amount of rounds in a magazine. What do you say to people who | |
| say things like that? Yeah don't tell me what to do. Don't tell me what I don't | |
| need you know. | |
| I mean, again, I guess I don't really understand. | |
| Well, I know what the mindset is. | |
| They think that guns are evil, period. | |
| They want to come up with excuses. | |
| That's all they're doing with all of this. | |
| They keep on coming up with excuses that I have to have a need in order to have my freedom. | |
| You know? | |
| Well, are we going to start restricting certain types of speech? | |
| That's next. | |
| It already has. | |
| Are we restricting certain types of religious practices? | |
| We pretty much have, haven't we? | |
| We need to stop this stuff. | |
| You know, at some point in time, somebody's going to have to say, wait a second, why am I offending you by buying this weapon? | |
| Unless I go out and for some reason, you know, I think I've heard Ted Nugent say this, you know, you dropped me out of space. | |
| Unless you have a reason to take away my freedoms, you know, if I've been a felon or something, I should not have any restrictions on my freedoms. | |
| Right. | |
| And just as we've seen, the attacks aren't always with a gun. | |
| I believe it was in China. | |
| The gentleman slashed, I think it was 20, 22 kids and staff with a knife. | |
| Yeah, I don't remember the exact number. | |
| It happened in London as well at a daycare center. | |
| Right. | |
| And those types of things happen. | |
| And when you talk about gun control, they're talking about murders. | |
| Russia, Brazil, Mexico have higher murder rates than we do. | |
| They're not. | |
| They have no guns allowed. | |
| Right, that's exactly right. | |
| But people don't want to talk about that. | |
| They don't want to talk about all these shooters who are hopped up on these different types of drugs and all these other factors that could have played into it. | |
| And we hear the excuse, oh, well, he had a gun that he took from his mom. | |
| Well, first of all, the guy, I guess you could say, stole the gun from his mother, took it to a school zone, which was two felonies already, just walking in the door with a gun, and then decided to open fire. | |
| Yeah, I hear about the laws. | |
| Again, you make a law, only the law-abiding citizens will not break the law. | |
| That's exactly right, because, I mean, if you impose a clip size or a weapon type, that's just for law-abiding citizens not to carry this thing. | |
| This guy obviously wasn't caring about the law, even before he shot a shot, just taking his firearm to the school. | |
| He obviously wasn't, you know, abiding by the law. | |
| Exactly, yeah. | |
| And that's what's just, again, ridiculous about some of these arguments that also say that guns kill kids and their data. | |
| Eighteen kids a day are killed by guns. | |
| Well, their kids go from zero to nineteen. | |
| You know, disaggregate that data. | |
| When you get around to twelve and thirteen, you're talking about gang murders. | |
| That's exactly what they're talking about. | |
| They're not talking about that. | |
| And besides, it's a tool. | |
| And what we know about tools, you know? | |
| And another argument for the teachers. | |
| Oh, the teachers are going to shoot the kids. | |
| Oh, I can't believe that I'm 364 days out of the year. | |
| You know, teachers are wonderful. | |
| Oh, they're wonderful. | |
| We couldn't do without them. | |
| They're heroes. | |
| And then on day 365, suddenly they're going to be killing kids. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| If a teacher wants to be that Idiotic. | |
| They've got scissors, pencils, scalpels in our biology lab. | |
| There should be blood running in the streets if teachers are that maniac, maniacal. | |
| So, this is a problem. | |
| They just come up with stupid arguments. | |
| They have stupid arguments, and that's all they really have. | |
| They misinterpret data, or they have, again, they just sneer at it and say it's a stupid idea, and they just go at homonym attacks. | |
| Right, and I remember when I was in school it was anything that could be used as a weapon was a weapon. | |
| I'm not sure if you guys have that rule down here in Texas, but I mean you could beat somebody to death with a book if you wanted to. | |
| If you were that motivated. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, I definitely appreciate you, Tom Dale. | |
| I know you've been up since early this morning. | |
| Do you have any closing comments? | |
| No. | |
| We just need to do something in our country, and we need to protect our kids. | |
| I mean, they are valuable. | |
| We spend a lot of money protecting our money. | |
| We don't spend very much money protecting our kids, and we need to do that. | |
| Plus, we just need to use common sense, and we also need to put our biases and our fears aside and do what's right. | |
| All right, David Thweatt, Superintendent at Herald ISD, definitely appreciate your time, sir. | |
| Absolutely, glad to be with you. |
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