Former Navy SEAL and FBI Special Agent Jonathan Gilliam, co-author with Sean Hannity of Sheep No More: The Art of Awareness and Attack Survival, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the Las Vegas shooting.
Gilliam said that survival in extreme circumstances begins with training and preparation before an attack occurs.
“Everybody listening, they have to realize that the possibility is there that they could get caught up in something like this,” he said.
“There is a possibility that there’s nothing but hate in this person. There’s a possibility he’s a psychopath like his father was, and that’s his only motivation,” Gilliam said of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock.
“We have to realize that evil people and evil things exist in the world. You can use the exact same databases that he used to plan his attack, you can use the same type of planning procedures that he used. You don’t have to become a psychopath to understand how he plans an attack,” he said.
“You can look at the critical areas, the critical times for those areas, the vulnerabilities that you have when you’re in and around that type of area like an open-air show, and the avenue of approach an attacker will take,” Gilliam explained. “You can look at every sector of your life now, divide up your life into sectors, and say ‘this is who would attack it and why.’ You can look up the history online and kind of build a database of who would attack it and why. You can also say ‘this is where, when, how,’ and you can put together these types of target packages on yourself long before you ever enter that arena of having to survive.”
“It’s the same exact way that Olympic swimmers and athletes will sit down and go through the entire race in their minds before they ever run it or swim it. That way they’re fully prepared for what’s going to come when they actually jump in the water or take off running,” he said.
Gilliam said it was very difficult to review Paddock’s attack and make precise suggestions for how security could have been improved, because based on his own experience at working in a hotel during his college days, “you can’t monitor the amount and what type of luggage somebody carries in and out of a hotel when they’re staying there.”
“You can train your staff to notice odd things,” he added. “It’s called behavior recognition, where they know what’s normal over a period of time in that hotel, and then if they see something odd they can bring that up to the management.”
“The other thing is, preventing it, I don’t know. I don’t think that there’s a whole lot in this type of a scenario where a madman rented rooms that specifically looked down upon that event,” Gilliam reflected. “A lot of times you can come up with things to mitigate the possibility of somebody doing something like this, and I think in this case that’s what you could have done. You could mitigate the circumstances, but you might not have been able to actually prevent the attack from happening.”
“I think mitigation, in this case, is what was lacking. I think law enforcement, especially in Vegas, has gotten into this mindset that they can’t think outside of the box. Vegas is one big soft target. Open-air events like this, where they’re surrounded by hotels, law enforcement should have counter snipers up, just like they would do at an NFL football stadium. They can monitor what’s going on, and if they have a sniper, then they just take the sniper out. Things like that – outside the box thinking,” he proposed.
“We suffer from a severe case of unawareness in this country,” Gilliam warned.
“We also have an extreme elitist group of liberals in this country that rush to politicize stuff, whether it’s the mayor down in Puerto Rico or this comedian Megan Amram that says these terrible jokes,” he said. “They blame stuff on race when it has to do with an individual who has light skin, and it never really happens, but if the shoe was turned and put on the other foot with somebody else, it becomes like an abominable sin if somebody makes the wrong joke.”
“The left has become their own worst enemy, and that’s become a real benefit for the American people,” he said. “Jimmy Kimmel is a perfect example. Jimmy Kimmel has this child who has this terrible disease, yet he can’t talk about it on national TV without going into a political rant that is so leftist. He’s done the same thing here. It just dismisses everything he says before any type of emotion that he has for his child. A lot of people get wrapped up in that type of stuff.”
“What has changed in this country, and what has benefited the American citizenry, is that they have learned to almost be investigators as to what is happening, and cut through the clutter of political nonsense you see when something like this happens,” said Gilliam.
“Instead of getting wrapped up in the politics, people are starting to see that they actually know quite a bit of stuff since 9/11. They’ve seen so much stuff that they can make clear decisions as to what actually really happened and prepare themselves for the next time they go somewhere. It’s the same thing as when you get on a plane now, versus before 9/11. People are prepared, and they know that if there’s a hijacking, they may have to fight. They very well may have to fight. Before 9/11, people didn’t think that way,” he observed.
Marlow noted that the reaction from the left to Las Vegas has been nonstop emotional manipulation, with reporters like CNN’s Jake Tapper abandoning all pretense of objectivity to push gun-control talking points.
“First off, we cannot make the mistake of thinking that Jake Tapper is a professional journalist,” Gilliam responded. “Jake Tapper is an opinionated leftist. That’s all. That’s basically all the guy is. He is a propaganda tool like the majority of the people that work for CNN and other networks. It can be a conservative network as well. Their goal is just to spread whatever their ideology is, and they mask themselves as journalists.”
“The guy who did this attack evidently is a millionaire,” he noted. “People make the same mistake about thinking – I’m not referring to President Trump here, I was actually thinking about Bloomberg – about thinking that people who have a lot of money are automatically going to be great leaders in everything that they do. That’s not the case. It’s the same thing with people who get up and profess nonsense like this guy on television.”
“Here’s the facts: the second, the very second guns were invented, you can take them out of the hands of every law-abiding citizen, but the second a gun was invented, it will always be in the hands of bad people. There’s nothing you can do to take it away. That’s a fact of life now,” he declared.
“Chicago is a perfect example of that. Some of the most strict gun laws in the nation, yet people die every single day at the hand of a gun in Chicago, and the majority of those are illegal guns. So this nonsense that comes up every time one of these shootings happens, it’s absolutely political and it has nothing to do with what’s going to stop this stuff,” he said.
“Jake Tapper cannot tell the future, so Jake Tapper doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Our citizenry can become so aware so the next time something like this happens, the person gets stopped immediately. Jake Tapper doesn’t know that,” Gilliam said.
Gilliam’s most important advice to people caught in a dangerous situation like the Las Vegas shooting was, “You have to take time and think about what will you do.”
“Even if you don’t plan the attacker’s avenue of approach and all these different things, if something happens, what are you going to do? Before you go anywhere, think about that,” he elaborated. “I saw video of people doing the same thing that drives me nuts at all these different events: shooting started and laid down. Some of them didn’t even put their beer down.”
“You have to act,” he urged. “If you just resign yourself to laying down, there’s a chance that you’re just going to die. You’re not superhuman. There’s not some kind of shield that goes over you when you lay down on the ground. You’re better off taking off and running and getting out of there. And if you do get shot, it doesn’t mean that you’re out of the fight. You’ve got to keep moving and get yourself out of there so you don’t get killed.”
“It’s the same thing with everything in life. As soon as you get stagnant in life, you’re going to start getting old. In the case of an event like this, if you don’t know how to act and you haven’t thought about it, you’re going to be 100 percent emotional reaction. Typically that emotion is going to be fear, and you’re going to be frozen, and you’re going to end up dying or getting injured, Gilliam warned.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern
LISTEN: