Almost coolest night ever

Well last night was almost the coolest night ever. My girlfriend and I had been following the "Safe Escape" segments on the local NBC news. Last years series was about child abductions, this years series was about school shootings. I thought that I had heard the exact same thing from Say Uncle (here), well it turns out that the DARE program that was mentioned must have been safety expert Bob Stuber, which you can see in the videos from the first link.

In the news series he taught the difference between cover and concealment, mentioned to use fire extinguishers for cover, and the option of putting soap on the floor in a bathroom so that they bad guy will slip and fall (which for the record i think is a bad idea). What was most interesting was the way he taught those things to the students. The school he was at let him drill a select group of students on a Saturday. He drilled them once, about half were killed by a pretend gunman. The talked about what went wrong made suggestions for corrections, then drilled them again. More survived, but he changed the game on them and the ones that did the exact same thing as they did the first time were killed (again by a pretend gunman.)


The girlfriend and I DVRed the entire thing and watched it before we went to the stage presentation last night. We had a chance to win an X-Box 360 and I wanted to hear what he had to say. Most importantly I wanted my girlfriend (who is a teacher) to hear what he had to say. It was really good, he did not pull liberal bull crap and got right to the point. He even mentioned once that the guns were not the problem, it was the jacked up kids.

About half of his presentation was talking about the violence cycle of school shootings, they tend to come in threes. He also talked about how to recognize a potential school shooter and what to do about it before they potential shooter becomes an actual shooter. The last part of his presentation was mostly a repeat of what he mentioned on the news cast, but he got people from the audience to help. My girlfriend was one of the helpers.

She thinks she was picked because she is hot, i think she was picked because he looks like a 12 year old. Either way - she was on stage and could end up on TV. The best part is that she also got the job of sending a chair through a window!!!! I am proud to say that she would have escaped. She even got to answer some after event questions for the camera. Because of her excellent command of the English language I have no doubt will be used to promote the program in the future. If I could have won the XBox, it would have been the coolest night ever.

If your children get the chance to particpate in the Safe Escape program, i would make sure they go. It is the real thing and could save their lives.


cube