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Florida sheriff vows to give ALL officers in local schools tactical gear and assault rifles in defiant video address – saying ‘our children and teachers will be protected at all costs’
- Brevard Sheriff Wayne Ivey announced Tuesday in a Facebook video that school deputies will both be armed with large rifles and wearing ‘tactical’ uniforms
- ‘I firmly believe that if you do not meet violence with violence you will be violently killed,’ he said
- In the past, the county would force deputies to keep any larger weapons in their vehicles unless there was an emergency
- ‘This new style uniform and tactical preparedness gives our team members the advantage and ability to instantly address the threat,’ Ivey said
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A Florida sheriff recorded a message to welcome kids back to school with a promise that the officers in their presence would be armed and ready for potential mass shootings.
Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey announced Tuesday in a Facebook video that school deputies will both be armed with large rifles and wearing ‘tactical’ uniforms on campus.
Standing in front of a green screen displaying his badge and quotes from both himself and Sun Tzu, he pledges to go to with whatever means to keep students safe.
Ivey emphatically says to any would-be shooter: ‘You are not coming into our schools and killing our children. I firmly believe that if you do not meet violence with violence you will be violently killed.’
The entire clip is backed with a screen showing a Sun Tzu quote: ‘Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought!!’ This is technically apocryphal as the quote is actually ‘Every battle is won before it is ever fought’.
A Florida sheriff recorded a message to welcome kids back to school with a promise that the officers in their presence would be armed and ready for potential mass shootings
Among the changing quotes during Ivey’s video included ‘It Takes A Community To Protect A Community!!’
At other times, the quote is replaced with: ‘It takes a community to protect a community!’, as well as ‘Our children and teachers will be protected at all costs!’ and ‘You are not coming into our schools and killing our children!’
The announcement was meant to reassure students and parents after a school year that ended with the massacre in Uvalde, Texas.
In the past, the county would force deputies to keep any larger weapons in their vehicles unless there was an emergency.
Ivey anticipated questions about officers having long guns in schools: ‘My response to them was simple. When’s the last time you heard about someone shooting up an Israeli airport? You haven’t. And the reason for that is that they’re better prepared.’
Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey announced Tuesday in a Facebook video that school deputies will both be armed with large rifles and wearing ‘tactical’ uniforms on campus
Ivey emphatically says to any would-be shooter: ‘You are not coming into our schools and killing our children. I firmly believe that if you do not meet violence with violence you will be violently killed’
In the past, the county would force deputies to keep any larger weapons in their vehicles unless there was an emergency
The sheriff claims the new protocol will be more effective: ‘This new style uniform and tactical preparedness gives our team members the advantage and ability to instantly address the threat with the level of force necessary to eliminate the shooter and save the lives of innocent teachers and children’.
The sheriff, who has been serving since 2012 and been in law enforcement for three decades, cited the lack of preparedness for the shooting in Uvalde which has drawn outrage at a local and national level.
Ivey wants Brevard County schools to be ‘hard targets’ and to show that any officers serving on school grounds ‘mean business’.
A county in North Carolina also previously announced that they would have AR-15s in schools this year.
Madison County Schools are beefing up on campus security for the upcoming 2022-2023 academic year by partnering with the Madison County Sheriff’s Buddy Harwood to install heavy-duty weaponry that could be deployed in the event of a hostile intruder.
‘We were able to put an AR-15 rifle and safe in all of our schools in the county,’ Harwood further said. ‘We’ve also got breaching tools to go into those safes. We’ve got extra magazines with ammo in those safes.’
There have been 27 school shootings so far this year.
Maddison County Sheriff Buddy Harwood raised the importance of self-defense against active shooters and the failings within the response of local authorities in the Uvalde shooting as reasons for introducing the new safety measures on school campuses
The Uvalde shooting at Robb Elementary was the deadliest school shooting within the last decade. In 2012, a gunman in Connecticut opened fire and killed 26 people, 20 of which were children as young as 6 years old at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The total amount of deaths in May also surpassed those in the 2018 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people.
The ‘AR-15’ is also the name of the heavily maligned semi-automatic rifle, which was used in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Connecticut, May’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas and the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.