How Ballistics Shields Deter a Potential Threat to Your Facility
At The LockOut Company, we often discuss how two of our primary products, The Boot™ and The SmartBoot System, can protect your facility from a potential threat. However, we thought in this article we could go over a few ways in which The LockOut Ballistics Shields can stop a threat from both entering into a facility, as well as greatly hinder their entrance to interior rooms if the threat does make it into the building.
Hardening Exterior Glass Doors
The LockOut Ballistics Shield is a three millimeter thick, specially tested Aluminum panel that can be used to cover glass door sections. When used on external glass doors, The Ballistics Shield can first-and-foremost become a powerful visual indicator that your facility is not a “soft-target”.
Most active shooters, and facility threats of all kinds, look for locations they believe will be easy targets. By covering potential glass entry points with Ballistics Shields, your facility gives a clear indication that entrance will not come easy.
Should the threat decide to attempt entrance, they will be met with more than just a visual impediment. When fired into, The Ballistics Shield slows the bullet, allowing penetration, but minimizing expansion and creating razor sharp entrance points that make reaching into the shield to attempt to unlock the connected door, or otherwise gain entrance to the other side of the shield not only difficult, but dangerous for the threat as well.
While the goal is to cause the potential threat to abandon their plans for entrance completely, should they still attempt entry, the difficulty they have with The Ballistics Shield, mixed with the communication protocols and lockdown procedures allowing for faster first response from law enforcement, is designed to allow for police confrontation with the threat before they ever have the opportunity to enter your building.
Hardening Interior Glass Doors
Similar to the purposes of hardening exterior glass entrance points, installing Ballistics Shields on interior glass can also be a powerful deterrent should a threat gain entrance to your building. When placed over glass door sections, especially on older doors, The Ballistics Shield brings the protection of minimal bullet entry, minimal expansion, and the creation of razor-sharp, dangerous reach points for threat one door closer to those you are working to protect.
By creating valuable time as an intruder attempts to gain entry to interior doors while giving your building more time to complete a lockdown, The Ballistics Shield gives law enforcement more time to locate and engage with the intruder. Also, without some type of shielding, should the intruder have a firearm, they may have the ability to fire through glass and injure the occupants of the targeted room. With the Ballistics Shield in place, that situation becomes exponentially more difficult for an attacker, and makes reaching through the glass to fire into the room blindly nearly impossible.
Non-Intrusive Design
At only 3 millimeters thick, flush-mounted, and with custom designs including logos or text available, The Ballistics Shield is a non-intrusive addition to your school. While aesthetic is minimally important when compared to the potential to save lives, we also understand that people like students or building occupants don’t want to feel like they live in a prison, so we make every effort to ensure that your Ballistics Shields are not only incredibly powerful at stopping a threat, but also as visually pleasing as possible
Part Of A Comprehensive Lockdown Safety Approach
Ballistics Shields are just a part of the lockdown puzzle. A comprehensive lockdown safety plan, including not only physical implementations, but procedures as well, should be created to ensure the greatest possible chance for the safety of your building occupants should a lockdown occur. For more information, please contact us.
