ARANSAS PASS, Texas — With the recent shooting event at a church in the Dallas area, the Aransas Pass Police Department wants to help its community.
The Aransas Pass Police Department has reached out and will be working with local churches with free security training. They also want to help surrounding Coastal Bend churches as well.
“We are working with the churches, after the White Settlement shooting, which was a bad situation. But it could have been much worse if there had not been a plan in place, trained people with firearms there to stop that killer,” said Aransas Pass Police Administrative Captain Lynn Pearce.
These free courses are not valuable, they are invaluable.
“Unfortunately, the day and time we live in, there are bad people out there that want to do evil things, and if we are not prepared to defend ourselves to take action or mainly to avoid. If you see something suspicious that might be dangerous, get out of the way,” said Pearce.
The Aransas Pass Police Department is always searching for a way to give back to the community and one way is to help residents navigate through terrifying situations.
“We have been offering the license to carry for about 6 years now. We have trained over 1,000 people in that course. We started the citizen response to active shooter events probably 4 years ago, and we trained a little over a 1,000 people as well. I expect this year we may hit a whole other 1,000,” said Pearce.
While they hope their students will never need to use the "Avoid, Deny and Defend" skills, it's safer to be prepared.
“The bottom line is that we need to be prepared, we need to have a plan in place everywhere we go, we need to be aware of our surroundings, and pay attention to what is happening,” said Pearce.
For more information visit their website at https://ap-police.com/services/training-division/texas-chl-ltc-course/.
