Following mass shootings at a supermarket in Buffalo and at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas where 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered while heavily armed police waited for instructions in a hallway outside the classrooms, state Senator James Sanders is bringing back his series of active shooter defense training to educate and inform the southeast Queens community.
The first session will take place Saturday, June 25 at the Rockaway YMCA, located at 207 Beach 73rd St. in Arverne from 1 to 3 p.m.
Featured guests will include members of the NYS Division of Homeland Security, the FBI, NYPD Shield, and the Red Dawn Combat Club. Participants will learn how to escape a dangerous situation, how to recognize the warning signs of someone becoming an active shooter, the types of weapons used and how to fight off an attacker as a last resort.
Sanders said the event will be more than sitting down and listening to good information. This will be an interactive demonstration where participants will learn defense techniques to take a shooter down, just by using everyday objects that are within their reach.
“Hopefully, this never happens to you, but if it does, you better have a plan,” Sanders said. “Most people don’t live because they are not prepared to live. They don’t think about it, and therefore they don’t know what to do.”
Now serving in his fourth term in Albany, the U.S. Marine Corps veteran said victims in mass shooting events across the country in recent years never imagined they would be caught in a mass casualty event and it is time to adopt a more proactive mindset, one in which everyone asks themselves — could I be next?
“Committed people who are serious, especially if they are trained, can absolutely take an attacker down,” Sanders said. “This information that we are bringing to you is not meant to scare you, but to do the opposite — to allow us to live. We live in an America that is awash in guns. There are more guns than people, and yet with all these guns, we feel less and less safe.”
To RSVP for the survival training visit here. For more information call his district office at 718-327-7017.
