Fake shots. Fake chaos. But some active shooter scenarios at schools across the country are all too real and common. The latest deadly school shooting was last week at a Santa Clarita High School in California.
What you haven't seen in the news coverage is a hero dog who emerges. The cloned dog is specially trained to run right by terrified people and go after the gunman, taking him down. That, along with a specially trained handler, is part of what Joshua Morton with Active Shooter K9 is selling.
“Ultimately it's a security company,” Morton said. “We're not just providing a K9 to the school, we’re providing a K9 team to dynamically address an active shooter situation,” Morton said. Morton said the dogs would also be able to do other tasks like find narcotics or sniff out explosives.
It's an idea conjured up by Morton, who lives in Iowa and Matt Saetz, who lives in Minnesota. The story about having a dog and a handler on school campuses caught national headlines in mid-August when NBC aired a piece about it. In that story, the reporter said a Minnesota school would be the first to get a K9 in January.
But it's not quite there yet. Morton and Saetz said there have been some delays for a pilot program.
Saetz said schools want to make sure the message is clear: That they're being proactive, not that they're dangerous. They said districts or schools are also concerned about liability. When KARE11 asked Morton if he would be OK taking the risk of students or staff getting hurt by the dogs, he said these situations are risky.
“Well if we sit here and we say ‘What if?’, we're just going to talk each other out of not doing it,” he said. “These dogs are very, very neutral to people so that makes them to be able to work in any environment so they’re not just there just to attack people,” he added.
Morton is a father of three. He is also a former Navy Seal who did a total of five deployments. He said three of those were deployments with K9s. He said he’s about results.
“It's just a horrible situation,” Morton said. “My background allows me to push the threshold and think outside the box,” he said. Morton characterizes school shootings as “war.”
Whether a school or district is willing to see it like he does and take the risk, is the question.
Morton said an Iowa school is interested in the one-year pilot program. He said once that happens, a handful of schools in Texas are ready to sign up.
Saetz said there is still interest from schools in Minnesota, but where things stand, there wouldn't be any sort of implementation until Fall 2020. The program would cost $125,000 a year.