virginia citizens defense league

Defending Your Right to Defend Yourself

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Published 8/10/2026

VCDL Book Review - "First 30 Seconds"

Book Review: First 30 Seconds

Subtitle: The Active Shooter Problem. America’s Four Decades of Failure to Adapt. What America Must Change to Minimize Victims

Author: Ed Monk, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired)

I have personally known Ed Monk from the early days of what was then the Northern Virginia Citizens Defense League. Ed was, and still is, an educator at heart. He had put together a course on the history of the Second Amendment that he offered at gun shows or wherever someone wanted the course.

First 30 Seconds takes a detailed look at many of the past public mass-shootings to help glean as much information from them as possible.

One thing that is clear is that to work through a problem like minimizing the number of casualties at a mass-murder event, you must take emotion out of the equation and only work with facts, logic, and reason.

Ed starts by first asking the school administrator or business manager a very simple question: “How many casualties are you willing to accept before someone with a gun is able to stop an active killer?”

The typical response is, “Hopefully, none!”

To which Ed says, quite correctly, “‘Hope’ is NOT a plan!”

Another common statement is, “But our school is not a battle zone!”

Ed’s retort, “It is once the first shot is fired.”

Ed unflinchingly says that planning to limit the number of victims of a mass murder is a function of time and basic mathematics.

Statistically, in the first minute, a mass-killer typically shoots one person every 3 to 5 seconds. (Note that the number of victims per minute drops somewhat as time goes on and the book covers those values.)

So, if the goal is to keep the number of victims shot to less than 10, then someone MUST engage to killer within the first 30 seconds after the first shot is fired. Time and math.

If a good guy with a gun is not in the immediate area when that first shot goes off, it is highly unlikely that they will be able to neutralize the killer within those 30 seconds. It takes time to realize that what is being heard are gunshots (and that assumes the good guy was even close enough to hear the shots at all), then figure out where the shots are coming from, run to that location, figure out who is doing the shooting, and then engage and neutralize the threat.

The time to call the police and for them to arrive and do the steps above, is well into 5 to 10 minutes! By that time a lot of people have already been shot, or the killer has run out of victims to shoot. Even when they arrive, police in some situations have mustered outside the school while the murders continue.

If the goal is to minimize the number of victims, the answer is clear: there needs to be as many armed good guys as possible distributed in the buildings.

Have you ever heard of a mass shooting in a Utah public school? No? Perhaps that’s because anyone with a concealed handgun permit can carry a concealed handgun in a Utah school – teachers, parents, air conditioner repair men, janitors, administrators, etc. The deterrence factor is huge! Who would the bad guy shoot first, not knowing who is armed?

But Virginia schools have stubbornly insisted on using mass-shooting prevention methods that have been repeatedly proven to be worthless. Administrators must face this reality: there is no such thing as a non-violent solution to an extremely violent problem! No classroom would be safer than one with a teacher who voluntarily took on the responsibility of being armed. 

I highly recommend reading First 30 Seconds (Amazon link). It is filled with useful information about saving lives from mass murderers. It is 200 pages long and is an easy read. The book explains the problem with what is being done now, how we got here, provides important statistics, details the solution, and shows how to argue for that solution. Ed even includes cases where desperate victims were able to stop a mass shooter without using firearms. That is far more dangerous for the defenders, but not impossible in certain cases.

There is no reason why Utah schools should be the only ones providing such a strong deterrence to mass killers that they have not even had an attempt at a mass-murder event!