Proposals to arm teachers and other staffers to better secure schools against mass shooters are worthwhile, just as arming pilots was following 9/11, said Chad Robichaux on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight in an interview with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Robichaux is a former Special Agent with the U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS). His work with the FAMS included the development and implementation of the Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program — including training the first wave of armed pilots following 9/11 — after the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which screened, trained, and armed pilots.
Just as arming pilots following 9/11 has been successful in deterring hijackings and other terrorist operations, said Robichaux, so would arming teachers and school staffers be.
Armed personnel on site offer a quicker response time than law enforcement can typically provide to mass shooting scenarios, said Robichaux: “These shootings go down at these schools in an average of three minutes, and it takes up to eight minutes for law enforcement to respond, and that’s eight minutes too late.”
Left-wing resistance to defending school children via the arming of teachers and school staff resembles similar hostility toward the FFDO program’s arming of pilots, said Robichaux.
“There was a lot of pushback [to the FFDO],” said Robichaux. “People said, ‘You can’t trust these pilots with firearms.’ Well, you trust them flying your airplane. So now people are saying, ‘We can’t trust teachers with firearms.’ We trust them with our children.”
Proposals to arm teachers and school staffers “shouldn’t be written off as a ridiculous idea,” said Robichaux. “Some schools in Texas and Colorado are already doing this [with] teachers having concealed carry in their classrooms.”
Robichaux favorably recalled Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.’s support for concealed carrying of firearms on the university’s campus.
The FFDO “extremely” screens and vets pilots, including 6-month intervals for retraining with firearms and scenarios. “We don’t arm every pilot. We wouldn’t arm every teacher, but the right ones,” said Robichaux.
Schools would cease being “soft targets” via the arming of teachers and school staffers, said Robichaux.
Knowledge of armed personnel on school campuses would dissuade prospective mass shooters from targeting said schools, said Robichaux: “Even if someone is willing to die for their cause, no one wants to be shot back at,” said Robichaux. “No one wants to get shot back at.”
Mansour described “gun-free zones” as magnets for those who wish to murder others en masse: “It just seems to make perfect sense. If you make someplace a ‘gun-free zone,’ that is automatically a target for people that want to do evil and start killing people. You’re basically announcing that we are not armed and taking away any element of surprise that a place might have if the shooter goes in.”
Robichaux is also a decorated United States Marine Corps’ Force Reconnaissance veteran as well as president and founder of the Mighty Oaks Foundation, an organization providing assistance to veterans. It describes itself as “committed to serving brokenhearted [warriors] by providing intensive peer-based discipleship through a series of programs, outpost meetings, and speaking events.”
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