OSHKOSH, Wis. — One day after 19 children and two teachers died in a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, hundreds of members of law enforcement are in Wisconsin for active threat training.
The timing of the active threat training in Oshkosh is not lost on any of the law enforcement, especially after the horror in Uvalde.
TMJ4 News talked to a police chief from a small town in Texas, not far from Uvalade. He explained how his work helps rural communities respond to mass shootings.
"I know the challenges they face. We've trained out there. I have personally trained in Uvalde," Chief Terry Nichols said.
Chief Nichols leads the police department in Seguin, Texas. It is a small town about 110 miles from Uvalde and about 25 miles from Sutherland Springs where 26 people were killed at a church in 2017.
WATCH: Chief Terry Nichols, who leads a Texas police department, is teaching how rural communities can prepare response plans for mass tragedies.
He came to the conference in Oshkosh to teach rural communities how to come up with a response plan for mass tragedies.
"What you find in these smaller, rural communities is you deal with a lot of volunteer fire departments. And they may not have the resources or the training to respond to situations like this," Chief Nichols explained. "Our job is to coordinate with them, train with them ahead of time, so we're all on the same page, so when we talk about, hey, I need you to come to crisis site that we've secured, and we have a lot of injured people, very seriously injured people, how do you go in there and start triaging them, and start getting them off the floor, and getting them into the ambulance to care."
In the case of Uvalde, first responders had to stabilize many of the victims before rushing them more than an hour away to a trauma center hospital in San Antonio. Chief Nichols says officers are trained with tourniquets because every second counts.
"Conferences like this are so important. We all get on the same page ahead of time, that we cannot wait until tragedy day to make these decisions," he said.
The conference began on Monday and runs through Thursday.
"It speaks to a higher power," Chief Nichols said. "Maybe there's a reason I'm here."
