Wow! Even the Record recommends our class! Nice!
By MIKE KELLY
RECORD COLUMNIST

A new shooting range in Woodland Park offers a steady stream of classes on how to fire rifles and pistols. But on two evenings next week, students at the Gun for Hire range will pretend to be unarmed and learn how to avoid getting shot by a killer at a mall, a school or another unprotected spot.

This is the new America in the wake of Columbine, Newtown – and, now, Paramus, where a troubled young man showed up Monday at the Westfield Garden State Plaza with a rifle, setting off a night of panic and renewing national concerns about how to stay safe in what seems like an increasingly gun-filled world.

Gun for Hire, which advertises itself as “America’s Urban Defense Institute,” is offering a four-hour class, taught by two SWAT officers, on such basics as how to hide, how to run away and alert police without getting shot by mistake or, as a last resort, how to throw a well-placed punch.

“It’s a scary world today,” said Gun for Hire owner Anthony Colandro, citing what may be a new mantra for a nation that has experienced a record number of mass shootings in the last 15 months.

That Richard Shoop, 20, of Teaneck killed only himself at Garden State Plaza on Monday night doesn’t matter, experts on both sides of the gun control debate say. When Shoop walked into the mall, dressed in black, wearing a black motorcycle helmet and brandishing a semiautomatic rifle modified to look like an AK-47, he fit the portrait of a mass killer.

As Shoop fired randomly into a ceiling and at an escalator, an elevator and a store, scores of horrified shoppers and employees thought they were about to witness another mass murder akin to what took place at the Washington Navy Yard in September, at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in December, at a movie theater in Colorado in July 2012 or at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August 2012.

But none of Shoop’s bullets hit anyone – except for a final shot he administered to himself in a remote section of the mall.

The Garden State Plaza incident is now being categorized by gun rights proponents and critics alike as a “near miss.” But in a nation awash in guns, the scare in the Paramus mall raises an inevitable question that may ultimately have a profound impact on the way we live: Is anyplace safe anymore?

For many, the answer is a resounding no.

Indeed, this issue may be one of the few in which both sides in America’s gun control debate might actually agree.

“We’re really not safe anymore,” said Colandro, an outspoken critic of gun restrictions, especially New Jersey’s tough rules on carrying concealed weapons.

Nicola Bocour, project director of CeaseFire NJ, a gun control advocacy group, offers a similar assessment. “It’s getting harder and harder to pinpoint places where people tend to congregate and feel safe,” she said.

But merely raising the question of safety reopens the festering debate over the proliferation of guns in America and what sort of firepower ordinary citizens should be allowed to own.

For some, the Paramus incident is yet another warning that America needs to take serious measures to reduce the number of guns, especially military-style, semiautomatic rifles that come equipped with magazines that can hold dozens of bullets – weapons commonly known as assault rifles.

“People tend to forget the near misses like Paramus,” said Josh Sugarman of the Violence Policy Center, a non-profit in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for stricter gun laws. “No place is safe.”

Sugarman said Paramus – and another shooting last week at Los Angeles International Airport in which a security officer was killed – are vivid reminders of the need for stricter federal legislation on the sales and marketing of military-style weaponry as well as the need to find ways to keep guns out of the hands of disturbed people.

Gun rights advocates disagree. Many say the best defense against a deranged gunman is for ordinary citizens to carry guns themselves when they visit malls and other soft targets.

In offering advice to “harden soft targets,” a gun rights blog titled “Get Real America” recommends that ordinary citizens “must apply for and get trained to carry a concealed firearm.”

Authorities describe Shoop as a drug user who had a number of minor run-ins with police. Friends have said he had become increasingly troubled in the days before he barged into Garden State Plaza after stealing a rifle owned by his brother Kevin.

The gun had been confiscated last January by police after Richard reportedly tried to steal it and got into a fight with Kevin. A judge allowed Kevin to retrieve the gun in September after he reportedly told authorities he would keep it secured.

The rifle’s journey, from its confiscation after an attempted theft by a brother, to its return to its owner and then its theft again by the brother who took it to the mall, illustrates in part the difficulty for police in stopping dangerous people from obtaining guns.

Ramsey Police Chief Bryan Gurney, who dispatched one of his patrol cars to the Plaza on Monday night, conceded that he does not know what can be done at this point in America to stop the flow of guns to potential killers – and then to stop the killers from entering malls and other so-called soft targets such as churches and theaters where people are generally not forced to pass through a security check.

Without extensive changes in American life, Gurney said, police have a near-impossible job. “I don’t know what you can do to stop someone from just going into a mall and killing people,” he said.

Gurney’s best solution, he said, is to encourage his Ramsey officers to carry concealed pistols when they are off duty – and especially if they go to a mall.

Charlie Minn, a documentary filmmaker whose most recent movie explores the 1993 killing of six passengers on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and the wounding of 19 others by a mentally unstable gunman, said even strict laws won’t stop disturbed killers.

“It’s too late,” said Minn, whose film debuts next week and features Arlene and Jacob Locicero of Hawthorne, whose daughter, Amy, was among the dead in the Long Island Rail Road Massacre. “The guns are out there, too far and wide, for anyone to pick up.”

Some institutions that try to keep an open door find themselves struggling to impose some safety measures.

Security guards at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark search some worshipers’ backpacks or bags – but not all.

“It’s done very quietly and it’s done very professionally,” said James Goodness, a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark. “I have not heard or seen any negative reaction to that. I think people do understand. We want to believe that everybody who is coming to church is there to come to church.”

Bag inspection and even metal detectors have become more common at sporting events and concerts. But the notion of installing such measures at American malls is still frowned upon.

One problem is that most large malls have dozens of entrances, are open for 12 hours or more each day and attract tens of thousands of customers. Cost for hiring security guards for every door and every hour would be high.

What has emerged is a growing number of security advisers such as Gun for Hire’s Anthony Colandro. But the advice he offers seems more like common sense.

“What can people do in a mall?” Colandro said. “Always be in a heightened state of awareness. Know where the exits are. Know the difference between cover and concealment. Cover will stop a bullet. Concealment allows you to hide.”

Colandro adds that he no longer goes to malls, sports arenas or stadiums or movie theaters. “It’s too uncontrollable,” he said.

At Garden State Plaza the other day, workers spackled over a bullet hole by an exit sign in the ceiling outside the Godiva chocolate store.

“Is that where it happened? Wow,” said Diana Bero, an acting teacher, who said the shooting had not stopped her from driving from her home in Westchester County to go shopping at the mall.

“I feel safe,” Bero said. “My own feeling is that if your time is up, your time is up.”

Another shopper, Dennis Hallahan of Bogota, who came to the Plaza to have his computer fixed, said he is also resigned to the possibility of a mass shooting.

“It’s what it is,” he said. “People are nuts. They’re going to do stuff. If something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

Finding a solution to improving safety may ultimately involve more than politics, training classes or even improved security measures.

“We’re in a gun culture,” said Nicola Bocour of CeaseFire NJ. “We need to be able to take the gun-colored glasses off and just see the facts.”

http://gunforhire.com/classes/civilian-response-to-an-active-shooter-situation/

 

“It’s a scary world today,” said Gun for Hire owner Anthony Colandro, citing what may be a new mantra for a nation that has experienced a record number of mass shootings in the last 15 months.

 

Is this true?  I can't find statistics that are recent enough to confirm this.  I know media reporting of shootings is up.

Is this true?  I can't find statistics that are recent enough to confirm this.  I know media reporting of shootings is up.

I based that quote on Aurora, Wisconsin, and LAX.

Nice

Is this true?  I can't find statistics that are recent enough to confirm this.  I know media reporting of shootings is up.

 

Attended a seminar within the last two week and the presenter reported active shooter events were up 150% in the last 20 months.

Front page article!  Nice Anthony.

 

Let's see how long it takes for The Record to endorse concealed carry, so we can have a chance to defend ourselves by shooting back.

Front page article!  Nice Anthony.

 

Let's see how long in takes The Record to endorse concealed carry, so we can have a chance to defend ourselves by shooting back.

Don't hold your breath. The article, while well written, was still bias'd towards the anti-gun side of things. I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon. 

 

But the bright side is, at least they are showing the positive side of classes like this.