EX Texas cop trains kids to take down an active school shooter

Role players act in an ALICE Training video. The program encourages an active civilian response to active shooters. In this scene, a shooter enters a classroom, and students quickly pelt him with whatever they have before dog piling.

TIMELINE: A history of mass shooting in America ... less Role players act in an ALICE Training video. The program encourages an active civilian response to active shooters. In this scene, a shooter enters a classroom, and students quickly pelt him with whatever they ... more Image 1 of / 56 Caption Close EX Texas cop trains kids to take down an active school shooter 1 / 56 Back to Gallery

People called Greg Crane a crazy Texan in the early 2000s, when he suggested grade school students be educated to take down an active shooter themselves. It was a controversial proposal for the former Texas cop to make.

But since then, America's epidemic of random mass shooters has only grown; of 166 fatal incidents tallied worldwide since 2000, 133 were in the United States. Now thousands of law enforcement agencies, schools and religious places are using Crane's program, called ALICE, which upends traditional wisdom of an active shooter lockdown, and teaches students an active response.

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"Everyone is taught to remain passive and static," he said. "That defense is not in line with the violence they're facing. There comes a time, unfortunately—and it's just life—where you have to respond yourself."

And Crane's convictions are apparent in modern national standards. A 2012 program called Run Hide Fight, produced jointly by the City of Houston and the Department of Homeland Security and promoted by the FBI, broke from shelter in place protocol, encouraging potential victims of an active shooter first to flee, then to take dynamic action and "act with aggression" if they encounter the aggressor.

Kate Schweit senior executive program manager for the FBI's active shooter program, said national standards for both law enforcement and civilians have evolved through the last decade, as groups like the FBI have studied recurrent incidents. Instructing civilians for worst case scenarios--like coming face-to-face with an active shooter--can be uncomfortable but necessary.

"It is the reality of what we are seeing when we look at a situation," Schweit said. "And we want people to discuss those things."

In 1999, Crane was a SWAT officer in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. In the rare incident of an active shooter back then, law enforcement was trained to make a perimeter and wait for SWAT. But that was nixed that year after the massacre in Columbine High School, when police waited for 14 minutes for SWAT to arrive while shots were audible inside the school.

After that, the first officer on the scene was trained to run to the gunfire.

The change pressed Crane to ask his wife, an elementary school principal, how schools taught teachers and students to respond to a shooter on campus. Shelter in place, she told him.

For Crane, a former security contractor in Kosovo and Texas sheriff's deputy, that didn't sit well. So he designed a program, premised on the notion that an active shooter needs an active response, even from grade school students, and that there's no time to hide and wait for police.

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Video: Run Fight Hide - How to survive an active shooter

About six minutes elapsed between the moment a shooter opened fire in Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, and the moment that he killed himself facing apprehension by police. In that time he killed 28 people with a semi-automatic rifle.

Five years before at Virginia Tech, adults were shot dead while sitting on the ground, as lockdown drills instructed, when the gunman broke into a classroom.

"If someone is trying to hurt you with a firearm, that' probably the worst position to be in," Crane said. "And it's the one we teach."

He said he talked with Virginia Tech survivors who told him they didn't know what to do when someone came in the classroom and started killing.

"It's time we know what to do," he said.

Video: ALICE active shooter training

RELATED: State-operated universities have active-shooter safety plans

So he lives a life constantly on the road, traveling cross country from his Kerrville, Texas, home, training law enforcement instructors who go back to train schools or other groups in their communities. He gives four to six seminars a week, usually with 20 to 50 attendees, and has trained law enforcement at more than 2,000 independent school districts to date.

(Click here to see ALICE training for elementary school students.)

An active response doesn't mean running to the shooter—in fact it mostly means running away, which is not condoned in lockdown drills.

But for the few who end up in close proximity to what Crane called "a determined lunatic whose only mission is to try to hurt people," engaging is sometimes the only choice.

"The actual physical part of survival is not difficult, it's the mental part," Crane said. "You condition people how to respond so that god forbid if they need to utilize those tools they have the tools in their mental toolbox."

The first tool: anything nearby. Throw paper, pens, desks or chairs. Scream at the shooter. Don't give them a chance to aim.

RELATED: Timeline of American mass shootings

Crane noted that law enforcement miss the vast majority of shots they take, and not because they are bad marksmen. High stress in the moment a weapon is pulled makes firing accurately very difficult. Victims make it easy for a shooter by staying quiet and still.

Video: Ex Texas cop Greg Crane talks about surviving a mass shooting

Even if victims can't stop the suspect from pulling the trigger, Crane said, they can make it hard for them to aim.

And in the closest encounter, Crane said students should be prepared for a physical takedown, where a crowd pelts the shooter with whatever they have, someone goes for the weapon (which they throw immediately to the floor) and others simultaneously cling to the limbs and neck.

"If we outnumber a guy 15 to one, he shouldn't be able to hurt us all," Crane said. "Unless we just sit still."

So at ALICE school training events, instructors teach young students how to bring down a gunman, if ever the need arises.

But it's not just schools he helps instruct. He's had requests from malls, retails stores and hospitals. After the June massacre at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, Crane said he got a heavy uptick in training requests from religious institutions.

"Almost every demographic has unfortunately experienced one of these events now," he said. "So every demographic is interested in how we can prepare."