Security expert shares what could prevent another | Political News

A security expert shared the one factor that needs to be in place during an open-air event to prevent an incident such as Charlie Kirk’s assassination from occurring again.

Michael Julian is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s main consultants on energetic shooter response, office violence prevention, and personal safety methods. He has more than 40 years of expertise in the security and investigations industry.

Julian shared that the most important mistake from Kirk’s assassination, which occurred on Sept. 10 at Utah Valley University, was not taking an elevated shooter into account. Kirk was talking to a crowd of about 3,000 people when he was fatally shot in the neck by a sniper on the roof of a building about 142 yards away.

“Since the Mandalay Bay mass shooting in 2017, we haven’t had a shooter from an elevated position in, like, 50 years,” Julian explained, referring to the 1996 mass capturing at the University of Texas at Austin that resulted in the deaths of 18 people.

In that incident, the perpetrator barricaded himself in the remark deck of the clock tower on campus and fired indiscriminately until he was shot useless by police.

However, since then, three high-profile shootings have occurred that concerned a shooter firing from an elevated place: the 2017 Mandalay Bay capturing, the tried assassination of Donald Trump, and the assassination of Kirk.

“It was my thought that after the incident with Trump, if a shooter could get up there that easily and shoot at a president with Secret Service, there is certainly a vulnerability that we need to address and a concern we need to be mindful of moving forward,” said Julian.

He added that any open-air public event, such as the case with Trump’s marketing campaign rally on July 13, 2024, close to Butler, Pennsylvania, and the incident with Kirk, ought to have specfiic measures in place to prevent future acts of violence.

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“Absolutely, counter sniper measures should be taken,” he said. “If nothing else, someone with binoculars or a scope should be looking out for people on top of buildings.

“Not essentially have a counter sniper as far as any person searching to shoot those people, but in high-risk conditions with the president, actually, there needs to be counter snipers put on buildings searching over in all places but the stage for threats.”

He explained that if he were conducting a threat assessment and providing security for a high-risk event, such as a campaign rally or an event with a public figure like Kirk, “I might have a countersniper searching into the gang and wanting on top of buildings throughout your complete event for exercise.”

What to do moving forward

Now that these high-profile acts of violence have happened, Julian said it would be “careless and negligent” not to have counter sniper measures in the future. He said that Trump’s would-be murderer, Thomas Crooks, and Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, “had been profitable when they should not have been.”

He also spoke about the likelihood of a similar scenario happening again. “And now that it is occurred so incessantly, Las Vegas, then Trump, then Charlie Kirk, I guarantee you will probably be on the minds of future killers to attempt to discover a vantage level like that.

“I know that fear has arisen because we’ve got a lot more work … with Charlie Kirk, we had phones ringing off the hook,” Julian explained that whenever a mass capturing occurs, people all of the sudden develop into conscious and involved about it occurring to them.

“For many people, security is an afterthought or a reaction. They’re being reactive and not proactive. In the world we live in now, it means you have to be proactive.”