A new report by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center says that active assailant attacks at schools are preventable, and the father of Alaina Petty, one of the students murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, joins me on today’s program for an in-depth look at the report and its conclusions.

Ryan Petty says there are several areas of the report that really stand out to him, starting with the fact that there are many active assailant attacks in school in which a firearm isn’t used. To focus on guns, instead of the individuals responsible for the violence, is to miss the point, argues Petty.

To that end, Petty notes that the new report says the vast majority of the active assailant attacks in schools were over before off-campus law enforcement ever arrived on scene. These horrific acts often take less than one minute to carry out, which as I noted yesterday is a pretty good argument for armed school staff.

If the shootings are over in less than a minute, then you’re going to need someone on scene to stop it. “Law enforcement rarely arrived before an attack was over.” That means that, unless you leave it up to the shooter to decide to stop shooting, someone’s going to have to stop them. Why wouldn’t we want to give them the tools they need to do that?

The third thing that stands out to Petty in the new Secret Service report is the fact that may of the attackers “were suffering from a very terrible home life,” as he put it. Not only broken homes, but kids in family services, or bouncing around from relative to relative. Some of them suffered horrible abuse, and virtually all of them exhibited warning signs before they made the decision to try and murder as many innocent lives as possible.

Ryan Petty actually broke away from a training session with hundreds of law enforcement and educators on the threat assessment tools developed as a result of this study in order to join me on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co., and I appreciate him taking the time to talk about the study and its implications. Be sure to check out the entire interview above.

Also on today’s program we have an armed citizen in Delaware who protected herself after shots were fired at her car, a troubling look at the repeated failures of the juvenile justice system in Tennessee, and a pair of neighbors in the right place and at the right time to save a stranger’s life.

You can get the show as a podcast at Apple Podcasts, as well as Spotify, Stitcher, and Townhall.com’s podcast page. Monday we’ll be talking to Kevin Dixie of No Other Choice Firearms Training about the rising violence in St. Louis, Missouri and what he wants to do to stop it. As always, thanks for watching, listening, and spreading the word!