LAKE TWP.: An eight-man team of Uniontown police sergeants and patrol officers was involved Tuesday afternoon in a training exercise to prepare for the unthinkable: a gunman loose inside a school.From the moment Chief Harold Britt called out the situation on his hand-held police radio — one unknown male dressed in all black carrying a long rifle, a second unknown male in tan pants armed with a handgun — the first responding officer was on the scene in about 60 seconds.Running down the main hallway at Uniontown Elementary School, armed with a .223-caliber rifle held shoulder high in the firing position, the officer did not know the whereabouts of the gunmen until he could hear the sound of men shouting from a darkened classroom.When the officer found the shooters just inside the classroom door, he took out the first gunman but was felled himself by the second gunman, who was hiding behind the door.Two minutes later, a second Uniontown officer was on the scene, and within another two minutes, the second shooter had been taken out.Total response time to eliminate both gunmen: 4 minutes.But when that first training exercise was over, Britt was not slapping high-fives with any of his men.Police studies, detailing 65 school and workplace shootings in 30 states over a five-year period, show that 16 to 17 victims most likely would have been shot by a single gunman within that four-minute period.“And that’s if all the kids had been separated,” Britt said.Once a shooting starts, according to the study published in June 2008 by the police magazine Law and Order, another person is shot every 15 seconds until police arrive.Britt and his men spent four hours Tuesday, after school let out, to whittle down the response time as best they could.The police weapons were real, with live ammunition removed, and the public was warned about the event with highway cones and a sign that read: Police Training Exercise In Progress.There were no mishaps.Britt, who timed everything with a stopwatch, said a realistic goal of the training program was to eliminate both shooters within two or three minutes.“This is the one part of our job that we cannot fail at,” Britt said. “We can fail at not catching somebody breaking into a car, or speeders, or traffic violators. But an active shooter in a school building, we absolutely cannot fail on.”The Uniontown officers involved in the training program were three sergeants, Dave White, Nate Weid­man and Mike Batchik; patrolmen Shawn Adams, John Koehler, Dan Allais and Harry Lovejoy; and police cadet Andy Straley.All but two of the officers have children enrolled in local schools, Britt said.He said the sergeants involved in Tuesday’s exercise will train the other officers in the Uniontown department until the entire force has been trained to respond to a school shooting scenario.Britt said he eventually would like to see other area law enforcement agencies share in the training lessons his officers have learned.He said that since the Columbine High School massacre April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colo, one of the lessons police learned involves the placement of weapons in patrol cars.Because response time is so vital in those 15-second intervals, Britt said, all of the department’s patrol cars have their .223-caliber rifles mounted and ready on a bracket between the two front seats, instead of being tucked away in the trunk.Britt emphasized another invaluable lesson learned since Columbine: “There has never been a student killed by a shooter in a school building when there has been a police officer already there.”Ed Meyer can be reached at 330-996-3784 or emeyer@thebeaconjournal.com.