Active Shooter Response Session 3: The Plan

If you hope to be able to execute your plan in the midst of confusion and chaos, if you hope to be able to have a response that you can put in place efficiently in a worst case scenario event, something that's surprising, full of variables, something that, obviously, you weren't expecting to have to do that day, you need to start now, thinking about your plan, thinking about the stimuli that are going to cause you to execute that plan, and rehearse it, talk about it, drill it, and practice it. Now, there's two versions of the plan when we talk about spree killer and active shooter response. One plan is very simple, it's a three-step process, it's evade, barricade, and respond if you need to. The evolved plan, or the more involved plan, also integrates aspects of arming yourself. In other words, if you don't always carry a defensive tool, you may have to put something in your environment into play as a defensive tool.

And communication. If you can't solve the problem yourself very quickly, or get away from the problem yourself very quickly, then communication and coordination with those around you is also gonna be incredibly important. Let's break down that simple plan first. As we get ready to talk about what it is we're going to do, we have to think about the history of how we got to having an active shooter response course. What are some of the evolutions of proactive strategies?

How did we get to the point where we're not just hoping the bad guy gets hurt by the good guy, the police officer, or the other responding security officer to protect us? Let's take a look at some of the content from our school attacker response course that talks about the evolution of these proactive strategies like you're gonna learn in this course. The ideas that we're gonna talk about when it comes to responding to a spree attacker when you don't have traditional defensive tools are part of an evolution to a proactive strategy that's been taking place in the United States over the last couple of decades. If you go back into the 90's, what you'll find is that even police officers, the average patrol officer or the average sheriff's deputy, was told that if there was a spree attacker, if someone was actively shooting people, actively killing people inside of an enclosed area, a school, a hospital, a bank, they were supposed to form a perimeter. Their job was, in fact, not to go in and try to stop the bad guy, but to do two things.

One, to make sure that no other innocent people, other potential victims, got into the area where the attacking was being done. And, of course, to make sure that the bad guy didn't escape that area and move on to another area looking for more victims or go into hiding or escape the police apprehending him. So, they would actually form a perimeter and wait for the guys with special equipment, and the guys with special training, the SWAT guys. Well, SWAT teams started in United States in the 60's and 70's. And, as SWAT teams became more prevalent, as in many jurisdictions joined up with a small department over here and a small department over here, and maybe the county sheriff's office would get together and form a SWAT team or a special response team, well then, they would take over those duties as well.

So, it wasn't just the major cities that it started with. But by the 90's, just about every place in the United States had some type of special response team, and that special response team would train specifically to deal with things like these spree attackers. So, naturally, given that they had special equipment and special training, they would take the responsibility for those situations. Well, what wasn't really factored in, or recognized at the time, was the dramatic delay that occurs between realizing that there's a bad guy killing innocent people and the time that these special teams can come together, get their special equipment, form some type of plan, get into a position to execute the plan, and then make entry into the school or into the hospital area, left a lot of time for a lot of people to get hurt. And when there were people there who could do something about it, those deputies and patrol officers who also had gear and also had training and certainly had the responsibility, what I always say is if you've got the flashy red and blue lights, you've got the shiny badge, then you've got the responsibility to go towards the bad guy, go towards those bang bang sounds, and try to stop people from getting hurt.

Well, that realization came to a head at the Columbine incident in Colorado. The school attack where two young men came in purposely trying to kill people inside of that school with bombs, with firearms, and they did a lot of damage. They did a lot of damage while police officers were on the scene, but while the police officers were outside forming a plan and/or waiting for some of these special officers with extra equipment, and extra gear, and extra training, to get there to form their plan and to go in and stop the bad guys. Well, there was a dramatic evolution in law enforcement's response to spree attacks after that event. And what we realized was that the patrol officer, the individual deputy, the individual cop on the street, can go into those situations and do something.

And, in fact, should. So, a lot of different strategies were talked about. It was maybe a diamond with four individual officers, maybe a triangle or a wedge with three individual officers, maybe just a pair of officers. And, eventually, we got to the point where there's no point in waiting for four officers when you have one. If you have one police officer who can go into that school, or go into that hospital, one police officer with body armor, one police officer with a firearm, maybe with two firearms if they grab a shotgun or a rifle out of their car, can do a lot to stop a bad guy inside of those situations.

So, there was no reason to wait. What we're seeing now is a dramatic shift to where we realize that the individual teacher in the classroom, the individual doctor in the hospital, the individual store manager in the retail environment, shouldn't wait for the guys with special training and special equipment. There's no reason that you should stay huddled inside of a classroom with a group of kids behind you, hiding and hoping that the person with special equipment and special training shows up to rescue you from the bad guy. In fact, there are proactive things that you can do inside of that scenario even if you don't have a firearm, you don't have body armor, and you don't have special training. And, honestly, you have a responsibility to take action.

You should not be sitting still just waiting for someone to come in and rescue you. Don't wait for that special person with the extra training and extra gear. That's the lesson that law enforcement learned not to wait for the SWAT guys. Now, we have to filter that down, and the average individual needs to not just wait for the police to take action. It would be great if we could have a police officer standing next to us every day with a lot of training, a lot of gear, and the willingness to help us and the job to protect us.

But, the fact is, that isn't law enforcement's job. Law enforcement's job is to respond to calls for help, of course, but they can't be everywhere all the time. Even if we have school resource officers, or if we have armed guards at hospitals, they may not be in the room where you are with the bad guy when action needs to be taken. You may need to take that action. We're gonna talk about those steps but, the first part is, understanding that you can't just hide and hope.

The last 20 plus years have seen a fast and important evolution in the way we think about these situations. The biggest evolution that has happened in this second generation of active shooter or spree killer response has been the addition of the idea of evasion. So, in those early days, the idea of just locking the door and hoping the police would respond quickly in a school setting, probably made sense to a lot of people. But, now, we have a lot of empirical evidence that says, in fact, the safest people are the people who get away. The people who get out of the theater, the people who get off the school campus, the people who get out of the workplace, and aren't where the bad guy is.

And that's our simple definition of evasion. Get away from where the bad guy is. Or, at least, get into a place where he cannot hurt you. So, if you can get around a corner, if you can get out a window, if you can get on a different floor, if you can get outside the fence line, just don't be there. When you think about it, these spree killers are looking for specific people, or specific concentrations of people, in a location that they deem appropriate.

Now, historically, we just think of it as being someplace where there were going to be a lot of people who probably weren't prepared to defend themselves, or maybe in a gun-free zone where they weren't allowed to carry a firearm to defend themselves very efficiently, and they were just gonna be seen as victims. But, in the days of political terrorism, and spree killers that are tied to political terrorism, there may also be specific locations that, in and of themselves, become targets. So, it's not necessarily the number of people, or the density of people, or whether or not there are police or armed security or armed people there, it may simply be that because it's a target that represents the goal or represents an idea that people want to fight against, that's where the spree killing is gonna take place. In any case, the idea of getting away from that location should be pretty obvious. When we say evade, we don't just mean go out the door that you came in.

We don't mean go out the exit. We don't mean be afraid to break a window and jump down two stories. Think about it. You're better off spraining an ankle, maybe hitting the ground kind of hard and breaking a leg, than you are having to face a spree killer who's armed and intent on killing you and other people that you care about. So, evasion can take many forms.

One of the things you want to think about is, if you're in a restaurant, you come in through the main door, of course, you come in through the entrance, you talk to the maitre d, or you wait for the hostess to seat you and you go to your table. Well, as soon as you sit down, if you look around in that restaurant and you think about, wait a minute that's not the only door. There's almost always gonna be a door at the back of the kitchen. There might be another exit somewhere. There might be well-marked exit signs, or you may have to just start thinking about, generally, not looking at a map or going exploring, but if I'm in this building and I know how the building is laid out, where would the exits most likely be?

Because, if you think about it, the guy who's trying to kill people in that restaurant, he's gonna expect people to come and go through the main door. You may be able to find an alternative exit and evade much more quickly. When you're in a public space, getting away from where you are may not always be obvious. Let's take a look at another DVD clip, this one from a previous DVD for active shooter response in the public space, not just necessarily schools, and think about evading from someplace in the public. The first strategy that we want to think about when it comes to being in a public space where there's an active shooter is evasion.

If you hear the gunshots and you're in the parking lot of that hospital, school, mall, amusement park, whatever situation is, here's your strategy. Unlock the car, get in it, start it up, drive away. Of course, you may not be able to do that. It may not be that easy. You might be in a situation where there's a lot of people trying to get out of that parking lot where the active shooter actually is and your car is blocked in.

This may not even be your car. You may be inside of a building. You may have family members in the environment. Now, there's a lot of reasons why you won't simply be able to get in your car, drive away, and call the police once you know you're safe. But the concept of evasion is still what's most important.

Evasion might simply mean hiding behind a wall. Just moving out of the way of where the bad guy can even see you as a potential victim. Think about it, if there's hundreds of people around and someone is intent on killing lots of people, and you separate yourself from that crowd, move out of the room, move into a room, move around the corner, hide under a car, behind a car, around the wheel well, wherever you can get out of that person's field of view, you become much less likely to be a random victim. And that's what's important to remember. Many active shooter situations, especially in that public space, are just guys looking for random victims.

They really don't have an agenda. They really don't even expect to survive. They certainly don't expect to be able to continue doing this for some undetermined amount of time and kill every person on the planet. They're looking for concentrations of people to hurt as many people as they possibly can. Now, we can't really get into the psychosis of it, and we can't understand it, we don't even probably want to understand it.

What's important to realize is that, if you take yourself out of the equation, if you can get away, if you can evade that shooter, you can evade that murderer, you're gonna be safer. And the same thing goes for your family. You get that phone call from someone who says, oh my gosh there's someone shooting here, tell them to look for a window. Think about it, if you're on the second story of a school building, you're sitting inside that classroom and someone's shooting in the hallway, what you might be told by that teacher, what you might think about doing if you're that child in that schoolroom, is simply sitting there and hunkering down, trying to hope that the bad guy doesn't come into that room. On the other hand, if you take that desk, break out the window, and jump 10 or 12 or 15 feet, you might hurt your leg, you might hurt your arm, but that's a lot less bad than having that active shooter come into the room and being confronted with a madman with a gun, or a hatchet, or whatever that tool, whatever that weapon is at that person is using at that time.

So, the strategy of evasion sometimes is gonna have to take on some creativity. We may not simply be able to get in our car and drive away. We may not be able to just turn and run. We may not want to turn our back on the person. We may want to be able to keep an eye on the person and back away this way.

But the idea of taking yourself out of the equation, getting your family members out of the equation, first and foremost, the most important strategy for dealing with that spree murderer, that active shooter situation, as a public citizen. Now the reality is you could have a firearm. Maybe you actually are capable of defending yourself in that environment. You may be a concealed carry permitee, you've got your gun, you're in a public space, you're at the mall, completely legal, completely prepared, completely trained, you still need to get away. There's no reason for you to stay there.

If you don't have an investment where you don't have to defend yourself, if you don't have to get your family out of there, you don't have to go find your family member on the other side of the mall, just leave. Evasion is the most important and best strategy to deal with an active shooter. It's important to keep in mind that there are a lot of options. And, again, the options may include going out a window, breaking glass, or doing things that aren't always thought about. The next thing we're gonna talk about is barricading.

Now, barricading is the second step in our simple plan, evade, barricade, and respond if necessary. Barricading means to make it harder for the bad guy to get to where you are. Now, barricading can take a lot of forms. Obviously, if you control the space ahead of time, if you're the teacher in that classroom, if you're in your workplace, if we're talking about someplace that you work, an amusement park, or a theater, you can already plan ahead on where there are doorstops. You can plan ahead on what furniture can be easily moved.

You can make sure that the door is locked from the appropriate sides and in the appropriate ways. Outward opening doors are always gonna be harder to barricade than inward opening doors, but you can take certain aspects of the design, you can take simple hardware pieces and make it easier to make that door harder to open. Now, what's the advantage of just making it harder to open? Well, if we think about it, the spree killer is looking for someone who's an easy target. They're looking to kill as many people as quickly as they can.

The truth is that most spree killers go into a spree killing event knowing that they're not going to survive, knowing that they're not going to escape and do it again next week. They don't really have a plan for what happens next. They want to do as much as they can right there. And that means time is of the essence. They know that once they start, they fire the first shot, they set off the first explosive, they set off the first fire, they know that that clock has started ticking.

The police are coming, the SWAT teams are going to arrive, or someone like you is gonna be prepared to stop them, if they have to, inside of that building. So, they're not gonna want to spend a lot of time trying to get through a door that's harder to open when they might be able to go just right down the hall and find a door that's easier to open. Maybe that door was hard too, they're gonna go to the next door, the next door, go down the stairs, go around the corner. We've seen video evidence of spree killers in public spaces and in workplaces being deterred simply because a locked door was in their way. A door that they could have broken the glass on, or a door that they probably could have kicked down, or bashed down with their shoulder, certainly that they could have damaged the locking mechanism in the door itself with the firearm they were carrying but, because the door was locked, they moved on.

If you can't lock the door from the inside but you can set maybe two eyelets, one on the doorframe, one in the door, and have simple carabiners or snap links on a short chain that you can clip, when that bad guy grabs that door and tries to open it and finds that it's blocked. Could they get through? Absolutely. Are they likely to? The empirical evidence says they're probably gonna try to find an easier place to get through that door or to go to another door entirely.

Now, think about it, that also is gonna set you up for a little bit of a warning that if the bad guy is trying to get through the door that you've barricaded, you have more time to prepare your specific response. But, before we walk away from barricading, I want you to think about the other aspects of what it means to make it harder for the bad guy to hurt you. And that's the fine-tuned definition of what barricading means. Hiding is a form of barricading. If the bad guy doesn't know where you are, you absolutely make it harder for him or her to hurt you.

So, if you're in a position where it's dark and you're quiet, and they're looking for movement or they're listening for noise, if there's a lot of people down on the ground, maybe some of them have been injured and you're lying down amongst them, and they look and they think you're already injured and they're gonna go someplace else, that could even be a form of barricading. Now, we want to be careful to point out that hiding, in and of itself, shouldn't be planned on as your complete response. Just because you're hidden doesn't mean you can't be found. Just because you haven't been noticed, doesn't mean that you won't be noticed. So, barricading around a corner, behind a door, behind furniture, or anywhere, on another floor, a stairwell, an elevator, a closet, an office, being somewhere other than where the killing is happening and where the killers are, is always gonna be that first step.

You may find yourself evading several times. Moving to one location, knowing the bad guy's trying to get through that door, and being able to go out a window. Maybe that'll put you out into a courtyard. And if you can hide in that courtyard, or find another way to evade, you're gonna see that the steps of your plan, even the simple plan, evade, barricade, and respond, can be interchanged. You may not linearly go through them.

You may barricade yourself because you think you'll be safe in the room that you're in, and then have someone trying to get through it and decide to go ahead and jump out that second story window, hit the ground, and continue your evasion. So, evade, barricade, and respond are all interchangeable. There's not necessarily a linear element to them. But, in many cases, the empirical evidence from survivors suggests that evade, barricade, and respond, is exactly what happens if you end up having to fight. Very few people in the spree killing event will find themselves right next to the person who's trying to hurt them and not have the option of getting away, or hiding, or making it harder for the bad guy to get to them.

Sure, there will be some people in the immediate vicinity of the attack when it begins. And you may jump right to the respond phase. Now the respond phase is the one that always gets the most pushback in school settings and in a lot of workplace environments, because the people who are supervising, the teachers, the superintendents, the school board, the bosses, the HR people, the management, the owners don't necessarily want to have to tell the employees or the kids you may have to fight. We don't have armed security, the military is not here, the police aren't here yet, and here's the bad guy. You may be the one that has to, as we say in the personal defense readiness program, be your own bodyguard.

Now, that's pretty daunting to a lot of people. But, the fact is, you're probably a lot more capable and a lot more powerful than you might think at first. Even against an armed and determined or deranged spree killer. Just because somebody has a gun, doesn't mean you can't stop them. We know that plenty of people who have had guns have been stopped, certainly by many armed people, but also by people who had nothing but their bare hands and the will to fight.

Maybe some knowledge or maybe not. We have seen well-armed and well determined terrorists stopped by unarmed men on trains in Europe. We have seen students in schools here in the U.S. take guns away from people and then wrestle them to the ground when a knife was produced until some other people could get there to help contain the bad guy who had already murdered and was intent on murdering more people. The will to fight is gonna be the first step in terms of response.

Now, this plan may seem very simple. Evade, barricade, respond if necessary. But we're gonna now evolve it to the more complex plan that's also gonna include two other things. The idea of arming yourself and communicating. Both communicating with people in your immediate environment and communicating with emergency services if you have the opportunity.

So, first, let's talk about being armed. Now, if you carry a gun everyday for personal defense, if you stage a gun in your workplace or in your home for personal defense, then you understand already that defensive tools can greatly magnify your ability to stop a threat. Let's take a look at why it's important to understand how unarmed skills can work against an armed attacker and some of the ways that you might implement some very simple unarmed concepts if someone shows up with a gun. If an individual is considering what they might do if they're in a gun-free zone and suddenly confronted with a worst case scenario of an active shooter, well, they might think that they're without many options. The truth is, if they really understand a few simple concepts, they can be empowered to engage the shooter, get control of the firearm and, potentially, save many lives.

Now, for this particular section, we're gonna assume that I'm just somebody that's sitting in a public area, it's a gun-free zone, of course, I'm unarmed because of that, and an active shooter is gonna come from my right. Now remember, when we're looking at this, the shooter is not focusing on me. So, if I'm here and I'm not the point of the shooter's focus there are two things that I want to consider doing. Number one, is making sure that I get control of the firearm. This could mean shoving it toward the ground, it could just mean making sure that it gets away from me, but most importantly, I'm gonna make sure that my hand stays on it and I'm as close in proximity as I can be to the actual threat.

Now, the second part is countering. Now we're talking about physically fighting. Let's just keep it really simple. My arm is in a great position to start engaging the shooter and getting even better control of this firearm, potentially, disarming him altogether. And we want to make sure that we have absolute control of this firearm because the worst thing that could happen is I actually let go and back up and the gunman turns the firearm directly on me.

So, again, gaining great control, possibly shoving it down or pushing it away. After that situation, then I'm gonna go ahead and counter or engage. Maybe I'll use an elbow. I might come back and strike again. I might take a knee straight down and try to break them down.

But, the point is, you can fight, I could fight. You can go ahead and relax. If we're in that situation, though it's intimidating, I mean, obviously, if you have no firearm and somebody has one, it might seem like it's an overwhelming and devastating situation. While it's threatening, it can be controllable with those two actions. Making sure that you gain control of the firearm and then engaging the fight.

Now, once somebody is engaged, it's also very probable that other people will join in. It usually takes that group dynamic of one person taking action and other people will follow. Now remember, again, this is a worst case scenario. If you're in this situation and you can actually leave, leave. I mean, safety is always, obviously, the objective.

But there might be certain reasons that you don't want to leave. Maybe your loved ones are in the room and their only opportunity to stay safe may be you actually engaging the shooter. So, these are some ideas you could use to just give you one more way that you could walk out of a situation that seems completely overwhelming safely. Now, the idea of using unarmed techniques or just having your body and your hands and your brain against someone who's armed with a gun, like you just saw in that video clip, might be a little bit daunting. But I want you to understand that the truth is guns are just mechanical devices.

Now, if you're a gun person, this next clip that you're gonna see might seem a little bit out of the ordinary. Normally, we talk about the gun is this great equalizer in this very powerful defensive tool, and it is, but it's still just a mechanical device. It has to be set up properly, it has to be maintained, and has to be operated properly in order for it to protect you or anyone else. The same is true if someone wants to try to hurt you with a gun. We have to get past the idea that the gun is this magic talisman that keeps you safe no matter what.

Or this talisman of doom that will kill you instantly if you're in the same room with it. Neither one of those two things are true. The gun isn't magical. Watch this clip and pay close attention. It's kind of long and it's very detailed.

It goes into all the aspects that we refer to as demystifying the gun. I want to talk about the reality of firearms and how they can be used to hurt people and sort of demystify them a little bit. You know, if someone's living in an environment where they have never shot a gun, they aren't familiar with guns. Maybe it's you, maybe you've never shot a gun. Somebody loaned you this DVD said, hey, take a look at this video chapter on demystifying the gun because you need to understand that guns aren't magic.

When the gun's in the room it doesn't instantly mean that everyone's gonna die. And, in fact, you're really not in any danger at all 99.99999% of the time that you're around a firearm. Only when someone purposefully takes the firearm and tries to hurt you with it, and they know how to hurt you with it, or if someone who doesn't know how to use the firearm has access to the firearm and uses it negligently, could you be put in any real danger for any practical purposes. I want to compare the firearm to this everyday item that most people are familiar with, certainly in the corporate environment, in the educational environment, we use this quite a bit. It's a stapler.

And the stapler isn't scary. And, in fact, the stapler is probably pretty frustrating for some people when it isn't working properly or when it runs out of staples. Well, the firearm is very, very similar in a lot of ways. First of all, you have to know how to use the stapler. If you hand this stapler to someone who's never been trained how to use it, never been taught how to use it, you give this stapler to a three-year-old, they may or may not be able to successfully staple paper with it.

They might get lucky. You give this to a gorilla and put paper in the cage and you put this the cage, they might get the paper and the stapler together and actually be able to staple paper to each other, put two or three pages together. But, it's incredibly unlikely. If someone isn't trained to use the stapler, which is relatively simple to use, they simply can't use it. If someone isn't trained to use the firearm, if they haven't figured out how to use the firearm, they simply cannot use it on purpose.

All that really leaves us with is negligence. Now, right away, people are gonna throw a flag and people are gonna say, well, worst case scenario, if someone negligently uses a stapler is they get maybe somehow a staple in their finger, probably just pinched between the plastic and the metal and no one can die. Absolutely true. Someone uses this negligently, someone just starts messing around with this and happens to pull the trigger and the muzzle happens to be pointed at someone or themselves, someone could die. The stakes are much higher with a firearm than they are with a stapler.

That's not the comparison we're trying to draw. But, as mechanical devices, they both require knowledge in how to use them. They also can only be used in one specific way. If I put a piece of paper on top of the stapler and I close it, I'm not gonna get stapled paper. The paper is sitting up here, the paper underneath, the paper behind, how many of us have ever inserted the paper into the stapler, gone to put a staple in it, and then realized that we didn't have the paper in the right position.

The paper wasn't actually in deep enough, or the paper was in too deep, or whatever. The staple ended up in the wrong place. Same exact thing for this gun. If the thing that I want to hit isn't directly in front of the muzzle, of course, this firearm is unloaded, you can see that's a relatively small opening. It's a relatively small projectile.

It's even smaller for this rifle, believe it or not. It's about half the size of the projectile that's gonna be coming out of most handguns when you talk about this type of rifle. If the thing that I want to hit isn't directly in front of the firearm, if I move the firearm just this much, I wouldn't hit the camera right now. Just that much, two, three degrees, four degrees at the most I can be away from even at only 10 or 12 feet hurting that person in front of me. Just like if we insert the paper into the stapler two or three centimeters or millimeters even in the wrong direction or at the wrong angle, the staple isn't going to go where we want it.

So, we have to have the knowledge of how to use it, and we have to be using it properly, we have to be directing it properly. Now, one thing that people may not understand is that firearms are not 100% reliable. Every time you pull the trigger, it doesn't mean that a bullet's gonna come out and the firearm is gonna cycle properly. When you pull the trigger, there's a lot of mechanical connections inside of the gun. Pulling the trigger sets in motion a series of things that result in the back of the bullet being struck.

This primer initiating, lighting the powder that's inside of this cartridge, and then causing an explosion that pushes the bullet out the barrel and pushes back on the slide. And the slide, and you'll hear the springs move, the slide has to move back fully into this position which allows the empty case to be ejected and allows the slide to be in a position so that it is behind the next bullet coming out of the magazine. So that once it's behind the next bullet, it can push that bullet forward and up and into, obviously, the chamber. So, it's gonna be contained, it's not gonna pop out. It's going to pop out and go into this chamber.

This is gonna complete the cycle and then the gun can be fired again. Now that can happen a couple of times a second with a skilled shooter. But if someone allows the frame of the gun to move, if you've ever been around shooters and you've heard about unsupported platforms you've heard the term limp wristing, limp wristing is referring to shooting a gun and letting the frame move. So, when you shoot a semi-automatic gun and the frame moves it absorbs some of the energy and you don't get a complete cycling of the firearm. A lot of other things could happen.

You could have a glove, or some heavy coat, or someone who threw something at the gun interfere with this cycling. Anything that blocks this ejection port, that blocks the empty case from coming out, from being popped off of this little spike that's on the inside called the ejector and popping out can cause it to actually interfere with the ability of the gun to complete its cycle if something gets stuck in there. So, there's a lot of ways that this firearm can actually fail. Of course, we all know there are plenty of ways that a stapler can actually fail, right? We've all had this stapler get stuck in the down position, right?

If we were to jam down on the stapler and not release, obviously, we can't staple anything else. It's exactly the same thing. There are times when the staples themselves will get jammed up inside of the area where the staple is supposed to come out. You'll get two of them trying to get out at once and they'll jam just like the firearm can jam when the bullets don't get out of the way when they don't do exactly what they're supposed to do. And, again, we've all had that experience.

Of course, another way that we have probably been frustrated by staplers at times is realizing that there inside of this mechanical device are staples, ammunition. If we run out of staples, we're not gonna get any stapling done. And, eventually, that happens. And, quite often, it happens right in the middle of when we're trying to get a whole bunch of stapling done. And we realize, okay, I've got to open this up, I've got to get the staples, I've got to put them in, I've got to close this back down, and now I can resume my stapling.

Again, exactly the same parallel inside of the handgun or inside of the semi-automatic rifle. At some point, these magazines will run out of bullets. We will not have any more ammunition. And there's nothing that we can do with this firearm until we hit the button, pull this out, find a new magazine, put it in, and then push this slide back forward, release it from the stop mechanism that was there. Or, it may have gone forward, and we had to pull it back and recharge the gun again, putting another round into the chamber.

And, until we go through that process, we can't do anything else with this firearm. Now, certainly if we had multiple staplers, we could move from one stapler to the next and we could drop this stapler and reach into our pocket pull out our second stapler and go right on stapling. Same thing for the bad guy. If he has multiple firearms, he can shoot this one until it's empty, drop it, put in his bag, put it in his pocket, pull out another one. But what happens during that time?

What happens in that moment when the gun can't be fired? When the bad guy is switching from one gun to another is really important. And that could be one of your stimulus response patterns that you set up. Knowing ahead of time that, eventually, the gun is going to stop shooting. And the faster the bad guy is shooting bullets, the faster he's gonna run out of ammunition.

And when he runs out of ammunition and he starts that process of reloading, even if he's very, very fast, when he goes to pull that out, push this in, reload the gun, that gives you a second, or two, or three, or four, when the bad guy is not actively shooting people when you can get involved. Just like the pause that occurs when you have to stop and reload the stapler, the pause that occurs when you have to stop and reload the gun, or get a second stapler or a second gun, is a pause during which you can take action. And if you've been frozen in terror and you've not been able to control yourself, you've not been able to take action, you've not been able to respond, you need to program into your head right now if you're ever in an environment where someone is shooting and that shooting stops, they either have a malfunction because the gun didn't function properly or they ran out of ammunition and they have to change guns or put new ammunition in a gun, that is your moment to act. The last thing I do want to talk about is that moment to act and what you're going to do when you take action. Now, clearly, a firearm is incredibly dangerous.

It's much more dangerous than a stapler. But, again, we can draw some parallels. If I wanted to stop someone from being able to use this stapler and I were to be able to control where the stapler was, I don't even have to take it from their hand. If I can just keep the paper out of the area where the staples go, I can keep them from stapling paper. If I can control where this gun is pointed, if I can grab the gun and point it up into the ceiling, if I can drive the gun against the wall, if I can grab the hand and the gun and the arm and two or three people pushing this gun down into the ground, it can't hurt anyone.

If the good guys aren't in front of this hole, if the good guys aren't in the direction the bullets are going, they can't be hurt by this firearm. It's incredibly simplistic. And I know, to a lot of people, they see the gun as this talisman of death, and there's no way we could defeat it, and how can a school child defeat an armed gunman? Well, to be honest, it's pretty easy to disable their ability to use the firearm if you understand how it has to be used. So, the first thing we can do is deal with direction.

The second thing we can do, again, is interfere with that functioning. If we think about the functioning of the stapler, if we could interfere with that, if we can pop the stapler open, we can knock it open, push it open, grab the top of it, pull it open, well, no one can staple at this point, it's not gonna work. We can't get the stapling done in this position. Same thing here. If we can get our hands on this gun and pull this slide back, pull it open, even pull it partially open to where we cause that malfunction, or that jam, they are disabled.

We have disabled the tool of the attacker. If we can move that slide relative to the frame. If the person is in a position where we affect their hands that they can't push down on the stapler. If we grab their thumb, pull their thumb back. If their hand is up on top of the stapler and we grab their wrist and pull back.

If we keep them from being able to actively staple, they can't use the stapler. If we can grab the trigger finger, pull the trigger finger back, break the finger, hold control of it, maybe jam our finger into the area behind the trigger, maybe get into the position where we cover the trigger area and the person can't get their hand on to it because we've jammed this gun into the ground and we're blocking their access to the trigger, they can't fire the gun. The gun's not going to fire itself. They can't magically get their finger past your hand. You may be able to disable this gun simply by blocking their access to the trigger.

Well, I've so far just talked about this handgun. I haven't talked about this rifle. Now this AR style rifle, commonly in the media referred to as an assault rifle. This is one particular version. It happens to be the first version I grabbed here off the shelf at the Scottsdale Gun Club.

There are many different variations of this style of firearm. And, again, it's not magic. Just because it looks like the one the military uses, or it looks like the one the SWAT team uses, it may not even have the same capabilities. In other words, it may not be a fully automatic firearm. It's probably just a semiautomatic firearm.

Not technically an assault rifle, but we understand that that term has sort of been hijacked. Well, let's think about that, let's demystify this thing. First of all, if I'm coming through a room with this firearm, it is very easy for someone within arms reach to grab towards the end of this gun and steer it towards a wall, steer it up towards the ceiling, or steer it down to the ground. If you can direct the shotgun or the rifle into being pointed in an area where they can't hurt somebody, it's pointed at the wall, no one's gonna get hurt by this firearm. Leverage also comes into play when you talk about grabbing a long gun, as opposed to grabbing a hand gun.

It is gonna be much harder for someone to be able to control this handgun if I'm keeping it close to my body and I'm protecting it, it's gonna be much easier for someone to control the direction that this rifle is pointed at because they have more leverage. They can get down here on the end and they can twist and push and pull. You put a 30 pound kid on the middle of this rifle pushing on it while three or four other kids and a teacher are throwing things, or hitting me in the head, I'm not gonna be able to do much with this rifle. And it's a lot better than hiding and hoping. What else can we do with this rifle?

Well, here's the ejection port area. This area right here has to remain open. This door has to be open and empty cases have be able to come out of that area. So, just smothering the side of the rifle, of course, this rifle doesn't have an ejection port on this side, rifles are only gonna have an injection port on one side or the whole top area may be open here where the round comes out. So, if you simply think about clasping or smothering or throwing a coat or anything, even your hands.

You might get a little cut, you might get a little burn, but obviously that's much better than having someone actively using this rifle to try to hurt people inside of your work environment. So, just smothering this area of these modern sporting rifles, these AR type rifles, will cause a malfunction. They may get one more shot off, but it's very unlikely they'll be able to get more than one because of the inability of this area to function and clear empty cases so that the next round can get into the chamber and actually be fired. So, demystifying these is very simple. Point it in a direction where no one can get hurt.

Again, this gun is unloaded. We're gonna lock it open and you can see how small that hole is. If that bullet isn't pointed directly at the person, if I move this, again, about two degrees off to the side, you can't be hurt by it. If I can push it down into the ground, no one's gonna be hurt by it. Push it up into the ceiling, very unlikely anyone could be hurt unless the person was able to shoot through the ceiling, which is gonna be very unlikely in most circumstances with these types of rifles.

Also, we have the same issue we did with the stapler and with the handgun, the magazine. Eventually, this firearm is going to run out of ammunition and we're gonna have to reload it. This is a more cumbersome process than it is with the handgun. So, it actually takes more time to reload a rifle and a lot more time to reload most shotguns than it does with the handgun. So, even more opportunity for that pause.

And, also, if you grab this in the right way you might actually hit the button that ejects the magazine. If you can get the magazine out of the gun, there may be one more shot that can be fired, but that's it. You may have just taken 28 or 29 shots away from the bad guy. Of course, the more time you spend studying this stuff, the more time you spend around firearms to learn more about how to use them, either for your own defense or just to deactivate them, you may learn exactly where that button is and it may be very easy for you, once you get your hands on the gun, just like it is for me, to find that button and eject that magazine. Again, the same thing with the hand gun.

I can control the trigger finger, right? I can control the direction the gun is pointed. I can attack the bad guy's vision. I can attack the bad guy's head and distract him and cause him to have to pull his hand off of the gun, to protect himself. There's a lot of ways to make it impossible for someone to use a firearm to hurt you.

And that's really the point of this discussion. Demystifying the firearm is an important part of personal defense, because if you believe that the minute this shows up in the room you're instantly going to die, you're gonna be less able to defend yourself. If you believe that the minute this thing is just simply laid on the table it's gonna go off and people are gonna get hurt, you don't understand the realities of the fallability, the vulnerability, of the handgun. Again, think about the stapler, think about your car, think about your coffee machine, think about anything in your world that's mechanical that you have to know how to use that has expendable either ammunition, staples, coffee grinds, whatever it is, water, any expendable issue like gas in a car, any mechanical thing that can fail like your alternator, or the hinge, or this slide moving back and forth, guns are not magic, bad guys with guns are not magical. The gun is a weak point.

The gun, as a tool, has things you can do to stop it from being used against you. Understanding that is a big part of being able to defend yourself against an armed spree killer in that worst case scenario. And that section of this course on demystifying the gun is actually one of the most powerful and empowering sections of our lecture series or the courses that we put on in person, especially for people who are intimidated by guns, who aren't comfortable with them, or you don't have a lot of experience with them. The idea that the gun is really nothing more than a stapler, the idea that the gun is really nothing more than this mechanical object, something that needs to be loaded and operated properly, is really new to a lot of people who see guns in the movies just work and stop the bad guys, or kill the good guys instantly, and quickly, and efficiently no matter what happens. Guns are mechanical devices and demystifying them is really important.

Now, if you're a gun person and you carry a gun, if you're trained, if you're prepared to use a gun to defend yourself or others in the worst case scenario, if you have a firearm staged in the workplace, or if you're at least knowledgeable enough about a gun to be able to pick one up, maybe you aren't carrying a gun, maybe you're traveling, maybe you're visiting a place where you're not allowed legally to carry a gun, but that good guy that had one just got killed and his gun's on the ground, or maybe there is someone in that environment who has a gun legally they pull their gun out and then they got hurt or they panic, they dropped it, maybe somebody says I have a gun but I don't know what to do, and that's highly unlikely I understand, but maybe someone has a gun, got their permit, but hasn't been trained, and you're better prepared than they are to use that firearm to help people, have you ever thought about what you would do if you picked up a gun, even from a bad guy? This is another important video segment that we taped previously. Again, taking this information and applying it to what we know at this day and age, in this day and time, about the way active shooters and spree killers are behaving, is incredibly important. So, pay attention to this clip. What would you do if you picked up a dropped gun?

If you know someone who isn't likely to go train with a firearm, or is dead set against training with a firearm, and yet, you want to be able to provide some information for how they might be able to defend themselves or others in the middle of an active shooter situation, this might be the most important information you can share with them. If we think about that active shooter environment, if we think about, let's say, a school. We have a school full of teachers, full of kids, full of people who aren't armed. There may even be a school resource officer there, though, who is armed. Or there may be a police officer who actually responds to the initial reports of shooting and shows up with a firearm.

If that person is injured, if that person is taken out of the fight by the threat, and that firearm ends up on the ground, even that person who's never fired a gun before, who's refused to have firearms in their life, who won't go to the range with you and practice and train, could still use that firearm to defend themselves or those children in that school area. And this is something I want to talk about for a second. You know, we sometimes overthink the complications of a firearm, using a firearm for defense. Thousands of people use firearms to put bullets into other people, both to protect themselves, and as bad guys, all the time with no formal training. They may have seen guns used in a movie.

They may be watching some kind of an online video clip. We don't know what their training is, but we know that they're not coming to formal classes, and they're probably not putting as much time, effort, and energy as you are into their training and preparation to use a firearm, and yet they can still pick up a firearm, extend it fully in and parallel with their line of sight at the target, relatively smoothly press the trigger, and get hits on that man-sized target. And that's exactly what we're going to ask that teacher, that nurse, that husband, wife, family member, whoever it is in that public environment, to be prepared to do. If that school resource officer's lying on the ground and he was using his firearm to try to stop the threat, the firearm is now lying there, the teacher's standing there, the threat's distracted over on another place, that teacher can walk over to any of those firearms, pick it up, and have a high degree of likelihood of being able to use it to defend themselves or the children in that room. And that's what we're trying to share.

You don't have to be an expert. You don't even have to necessarily understand the physics of the gun or the operation of the gun. If the gun was being used by the police officer, by the security agent, by the person who pulled the gun out of their holster, their concealed carry holster, if the gun was being used and it's now on the ground, chances are it can be used by the person that picks it up. If you look at the way I've got these guns staged on the ground, they're not exactly the way you would normally see me stage firearms. We've got guns that are cocked with the safety's off.

We've got a double action, single action gun that's in single action, cocked mode. We've got guns on the ground exactly as they would be if I was in the middle of a string of fire and I got shot and the gun got dropped. All the person has to do is understand some very basic things. You want to hold the gun as high as you can without interfering with the operation of the gun. Don't grip the gun down low, where it's obviously unnatural given the contour of the grip.

Hold the gun as high as you can. Keep your finger off the trigger until you've decided you want to shoot. Until this gun is gonna go bang. Very simple. So, the minute I pick the gun up, I keep my finger off the trigger.

Even with this single action 1911 style firearm. Now we know, as firearms enthusiasts, as shooters, that very little pressure on that trigger is gonna make the gun go off. The person that's watching this that has never touched a gun, never fired a gun, doesn't really need to know the difference between pressing that trigger and pressing this long, relatively heavy, double action revolver trigger. All we need to know is hold the gun up high, make sure that you don't touch the trigger until you're ready to shoot. If that bad guy comes into that school room, comes into an office space, you've got the kids behind you, stick the gun out in and parallel with your line of sight, look at the person's chest, touch the trigger, and, as smoothly as you can, press that trigger.

Under the stress in that environment, it's probably not gonna be very smooth, but it probably, in a close quarters environment, is a lot better than standing there looking at the gun on the ground and hoping the bad guy doesn't shoot you. Again, regardless of the type of gun, merely picking it up, getting a decent grip, sticking it out at full extension, touching and pressing the trigger is probably going to get the job done if the gun was being used and then was dropped by someone when they were taken out of the fight by the threat and that'll work for just about any type of firearm. Of course, this type of firearm, a simple striker-fired firearm with no extra levers or buttons, this kind of gun can come out of a holster and be used exactly the same way. So, one of the cues that we give to people who aren't firearms people, if you don't see any big levers, don't worry about them. If you don't have anything exposed on the gun, if the gun's relatively smooth, you see the trigger, cool.

Get a good grip on the gun, make sure that you don't touch the trigger until you're ready for it to go bang. And, again, if that school resource officer, that security agent, is taken out of the fight before they can even draw the gun from their holster, that's okay. Hit the snap, release the mechanism, whatever it is you have to do, pull the gun out of the holster, now you've got a tool to defend yourself. On the other hand, if you've got this gun, which has a lot of levers exposed, we see levers on there, we see that there's a hammer sticking out of the back of the gun. If someone who's not a shooter sees this type of gun on the ground they can reach down and pick it up, push the lever down, nothing bad is gonna happen here.

If you think about some of the types of guns that you know, as a shooter, any of the levers that you push on a double action, single action gun, they're not going to put the gun in a bad condition unless they turn the safety on. Now this particular SIG, of course, we know doesn't have a safety. I can push that lever, nothing bad happens. On the other hand, if I were to push a lever, and maybe the lever would be up here, or maybe the lever would be down here, if I were to push a lever and cover up a red dot, in other words, if I see red, I know the gun will go bang, if I move the lever into a position where I cover up the red dot, that was bad. Put the lever back where it was.

If the lever is pushed in a position so that it exposes the red dot or the red mark, now I know that I can use that firearm to defend myself. Again, you don't have to be a gun expert to figure that out. Let's say that maybe there isn't a red dot. On this particular gun I expose a blue circle. I expose the marking here.

There's an X, now next to a little symbol of a bullet. The X next to the symbol of the bullet, to us, might mean no bullets. The little blue dot, it's not a red dot, so it's an abnormal marking, it's not a standard marking. We're just gonna simply sweep this down. If the lever moves and we can sweep it down, and it's down on the bottom of the gun, that's usually going to be the way to go to get it to fire.

The other thing we can look for is an F or an S. The F or the S is other thing that we can look for. If we're in a situation where we find a gun and it's locked open, this is probably gonna be, now, an empty gun or a gun that's malfunctioned. And the fact is, the person who's a novice, the person who hasn't trained, probably isn't gonna be able to use this gun. They can still pick it up and point it at somebody, they can still hit somebody with it, they can throw it at somebody, they can do a lot of different things, but they're probably not gonna get the gun back in operation.

This is the reason why we would encourage someone, even who isn't going to carry a gun, to know how to use a gun. Just like we educate people about vehicles, just like we educate people about drugs, we educate people about safe and unsafe sexual practices. We educate people in our environment when there are things they need to know to protect themselves or others. We also should be investing in educating people about firearms. This is the last type of firearm that someone might find dropped by a security guard or tucked into a holster.

It's a revolver. Very simple, if you see this round, bulgeous thing here in the middle of the gun, no big deal, touch the trigger, press the trigger, gun's gonna go bang. We don't have to worry about anything else. Very unlikely to find what we would call a single action revolver in that active shooter environment. So, ultimately, the most important thing to understand is that just because someone isn't a shooter, just because someone won't go out and train with a firearm, doesn't mean they won't be able to use a firearm to defend themselves.

If you have people in your life that you care about, you have people in your life that won't go out and train, you should still be encouraging them to be able to look down at a pile of firearms and know exactly how they could use them to defend themselves or others. Extend, touch, press, make sure the guns operating, make sure their grip is decent, but most importantly, make sure they're not hesitating, just staring at it on the floor, and not even considering it an option simply because they've never shot before, or they've never trained. Now, for those of you do carry your own gun and think that you may have it during an active shooter situation, we're gonna have another section of the course designed specifically for you where we'll talk about how to train to use the gun in those situations and shoot in the defense of others. But, for those of you who don't carry a gun, and there won't be a gun there for you to pick up, what other types of tools might you be able to use? What about improvised, defensive tools?

Things that you would find every day in an office environment? Things like scissors. Maybe you'd find them in a school or another setting. Maybe you'd think about something like a hot cup of coffee that could be used as nothing more than a distraction. But, when that bad guy comes through the door, if he's looking for people to shoot, and you throw that hot cup of coffee on him, that could distract him and disable him enough to allow you to get your hands on the gun as we saw earlier, and then, either disable it or take it away and maybe even use it against the bad guy.

One of the important things to understand when it comes to improvised defensive tools is that there are things around us all the time that could be used to multiply the force that you put against someone. Maybe something like a bat. You would think of a bat as a club, an obvious defensive tool. But, what else exists in your environment that is bat-like? Maybe you've got some kind of a coat rack.

Maybe you've got a mop with a handle on it. That long mop handle could be used as a club. Maybe you've got some other implement, a chair leg, something like a chair, maybe a stool, maybe something you could pick up and use to create blunt force trauma on the bad guy. Think about how you might take off a coat. You've got a coat, you've got a raincoat, you've got a long coat, whatever coat it is, that coat could be used to smother or distract.

You could use it to wrap around a gun and push it up against the wall so that you're not as worried about the loud noise or the concussion or the gases that are expanding at the muzzle. When you think about grabbing someone, you think about putting your hands on someone, how can you magnify your force? A bottle, you could hit them with a bottle. A bottle that you could break and have a sharp edge and have an improvised blade. Are you in a restaurant?

Because, now, you've got forks, you've got knives. What about a school setting? What about any office setting? Whether it's stacks of paper or thick books. If you can take those stacks of paper or books, put them in a backpack, put them in a briefcase, hold them in front of you.

Now this isn't necessarily an offensive tool, but now it's a defensive tool. This idea of arming yourself, again, takes on many, many facets in the public environment. One thing that is pretty ubiquitous in the modern age in the public space is a fire extinguisher. If you think about a dry chemical fire extinguisher how could you use it to disable someone, either by taking away their ability to see, by impacting their ability to breathe, or, eventually, as blunt force trauma as a big, heavy, metal cylinder that you can use to hurt the bad guy. Take a look at this next clip on using a fire extinguisher as an improvised defensive tool.

One of the most valuable improvised tools that can be used for defense when other more appropriate tools aren't actually available is the dry chemical fire extinguisher. Now, this is the kind of thing that's probably mandated to be within easy reach of just about everybody in the kind of public environments that a spree killer is likely to attack. If we think about classrooms, we think about hospitals, even in the mall, inside of airports, we know that these things are very easy to find, very easy to access. And, obviously, they serve their primary function very very well. They help people put out fires.

And that's a great tool to have around because fire can be very dangerous. But of course, that armed gunman, that person who's trying to kill people who he thinks are unarmed, also can be either distracted or even possibly disabled by the appropriate use of this dry chemical fire extinguisher. Now, first of all, it's heavy, it's a great impact device. So, if nothing else, if you have it in your hands, someone comes up behind you and you were to strike them with it. You could throw this at someone.

Obviously, in that way like any other blunt object, that's relatively heavy, this one's made of metal, of course, it's going to be an effective tool. But let's take a look at how we can also use it to, certainly, distract an attacker who comes into a room, an attacker who comes around a corner. Obviously, I'm gonna remove the pin. At the point that I've removed the pin, now, this becomes useful for me. I can either point it with the hose in this position, shoot it like that, or I can remove the hose and actually point in a more specific direction so that when that attacker comes into the room and I hit him in the face with this you can imagine what that's going to be like.

You can imagine how disorienting and how distracting that's gonna be. Now you can say all you want about the crazed killer and now he's not gonna care about this blowing in his face. The reality is, he's certainly not expecting it. He's gonna have a natural human instinctive reaction to close his eyes, to turn away, probably to bring his hands, whatever tool might be in his hands up towards his face. And that may give you the moment that you need to actually move in then while you're spraying and actually strike.

And that strike is what's more likely to disable the attacker. Now, certainly, if you were to get this chemical agent into your lungs, if you start coughing, if you can't breathe, if you're to get blinded by the chemical agent, then we also have a situation where we have disabled the attacker. Maybe we are just the distraction. Maybe we're gonna hit the attacker from over here. And, while we're hitting the attacker, someone else is gonna come in and strike him with a blunt object.

Maybe use that pair of scissors. Maybe use some other kind of tool to, then, disable the attacker. Maybe they're gonna jump on the gun. They're gonna take control of the gun. They're gonna steer it in a direction where it can't hurt me, they can't hurt somebody else with it.

Ultimately, the dry chemical fire extinguisher is a great distraction and pretty good at disabling. It also can be used as an improvised barricade tool. If we think about it, if you think about the slick surfaces that are in most hospitals, classrooms, the kinds of floors we're talking about. If you coat an area with this dry chemical stuff, this is slippery. And now we've got this coating on the ground.

Someone comes running around the corner meaning to do us harm, if they slip, that obviously is gonna temporarily disable them, it's gonna distract them, and it gives us that opportunity we have to then go ahead and do more damage. To take that gun away, to impact tool them, to use some other improvised device. Dry chemical fire extinguishers, they're obviously a great idea, they're common in our environment, they're innocuous. Nobody looks at them and thinks of them as a weapon. Nobody thinks of them as something that can hurt someone.

But, in the worst case scenario, if someone's trying to kill you or other people in a public environment, you don't have that firearm, you don't have that taser, you don't even have a knife, this is something that you can certainly use, especially when there's multiple people involved, to enhance your chances of survival during that spree attack. So, some of the things that I've talked about here and the things you've just seen in these clips should give you some idea what we're talking about when we talk about arming oneself. Now, I want you to go to your supplemental materials and go to worksheet number one. Worksheet number one is going to be improvised defensive tools. That improvise defensive tools worksheet is gonna have a series of questions.

Some of them are very specific to your workplace. Some of them are specific to the things that you carry around every day. Maybe a key chain, maybe things you have in your backpack or your purse. So I want you to think about how to answer those questions. Take some time now, just pause the video, take a look at that worksheet number one, and answer the improvised defensive tools worksheet because it's going to help you react and respond faster in the event of an actual spree killing.

The next thing we're gonna talk about is communication. Communication is the last piece of our evolved, or more complex, plan for an active shooter response. Communication, of course, isn't going to be all that important to your personal survival if you're able to use the evasion technique to get away from where the bad guy is. The truth is, if you barricade successfully and the bad guy never gets into a position to hurt you, communication won't be important either. But, it may be important for you to communicate with other people, or other people that you care about in the environment, so that they also can evade or so that they can help you barricade or join you in your barricade location.

So, if we think about extending just beyond our own survival, communication becomes really important. If you're in a position of being in a place where you don't know how to get out, communicating with other people and asking where the nearest exit is and being specific about the way you communicate it. So, communication in the process of evasion takes the form of recruiting other people to come with you, telling other people it's okay to leave, telling other people that they should leave, telling other people, in fact, that it's okay to go through the kitchen in the restaurant to get out the back door. They don't have to think they're trapped because it's not where customers normally go. Now, that may seem silly right now while you're taking this course, watching this video, or even when you're talking to your family or friends about it.

Well, of course, I wouldn't mind going through the kitchen if someone's trying to kill me, but human behavior is tricky. If you are conditioned to not go through the kitchen, if you're conditioned to think that's not where you're supposed to go, there may be a moment of hesitation, and that hesitation could be the moment the bad guy comes to you and decides to make you the next victim of the spree killing. So, talking ahead of time, thinking ahead of time, and being prepared to talk to people in the moment about where exits are. If you know where they are, sharing those exit locations with them is an incredibly important part of communication when it comes to the evasion step. When it comes to barricading, the same time concept applies.

If you know where there's a place people can barricade, tell them about it. If you don't know where you can barricade, ask people about it, and don't be afraid to suggest specific places. Is there a restroom? Is there a storage closet? Is there a hidden area?

Is there a manager's office? Is there a surveillance room? Maybe in a club, in a nightclub, in a bar, there may be a secure room where they count the cash, where they watch the security cameras. Where is that room? Asking people these kinds of pointed questions when they know the environment may remind them that, oh yeah, there's a much better place to hide, a much better place to be secure inside of that building.

It might also remind them of a place that they can go that actually leads to evasion and getting away from the bad guy. So, in your barricade early moments, thinking about the best places you can go, sharing that information with other people, or soliciting the information from the people who know that area better, an important part of communication. Once you're in your barricade location, again, communicating with people about what you intend to do. Making sure they understand that the intention is to make this your final stand, make this your Alamo. You're going to barricade the door.

You're going to make it as hard as you can for the bad guy to get to you. Hope that he doesn't show up but, if he does, prepare to respond. And that's where we go back to thinking about arming yourselves, arming everyone else, and getting people motivated for the fight that may come if the barricade is defeated. When you think about communicating in terms of motivation, you need to remind people that it's not just about the good guys showing up, the military, law enforcement, security, and it's not about you saving them. You need to be able to recruit people as your allies.

One unarmed person against an armed and determined and trained and practiced killer may not be enough. Two people, maybe. Three people, I find it hard to believe that three determined people grabbing on to someone who intends to hurt them and isn't expecting any resistance can't win. You add on a fourth person and I think it's a pretty much a foregone conclusion. We have very few examples of multiple people trying to stop, smother, hurt, or disable an attacker and not winning.

In almost every case, when the bad guy comes to you into your barricaded area and you just simply grab onto him, two or three people, you throw punches, you throw kicks, you smother that person, hold them against the wall, push them against the ground, try to take away their defensive tool, when you do these things, you're gonna see wins way more often than you're gonna see losses. But, if you're alone, if you're trying to fight that person alone, no matter how skilled and determined you are, if you're unlucky, everyone's gonna get hurt. Because the people that are over there in the corner cowering that didn't help you in the beginning of the fight, probably aren't gonna suddenly become motivated when you get taken out of the fight. So, communicating with them ahead of time, getting them prepared and determined to help you, telling them what they can do, telling them to pick up that chair, telling them to put that backpack full of books on backwards so that if the bad guy comes in shooting there's a chance that those books will stop the bullets that are being fired at them. Empower them, let them know that you need their help, but they're also very, very capable of helping you.

This communication inside your barricade area is an incredibly important, and often overlooked, part of your active shooter response plan. Of course, the part that gets talked about the most is communicating with 911. Letting people know what's going on. Now, out of context, communicating with 911 is pretty straightforward. You call the police, you tell them what you need, or you call the ambulance, you tell them what you need, you call the fire department, you tell them what you need, and everything gets taken care of.

But, in the heat of the moment, in an active shooter response, making sure that you're communicating the right information, especially if you're an armed good guy and you're prepared to fight, or if you've picked up a gun and you have been fighting, and you're gonna report what has just happened, you want to make sure that the good guys that are showing up, know as much about what's going on as possible to include that you're an armed good guy and that you have been fighting. Let's take a look at one of our conversations we've had in an earlier DVD about communicating with 911 and what's important to convey when you're asking for help coming to an active shooter or ongoing violent situation. If we have someone trying to get into our house, someone has gotten into our house, and we've been able to get into a barricade situation, we've been able to get our family behind us, we've been able to get our firearm, we're armed, we're barricaded, and now we're on the phone. We're gonna make the emergency contact. When we call the emergency contact, we need to be able to tell them five things.

The first thing is where you are. Now, while they may be able to track that information, you may be on a cell phone, you may be someplace that you're not normally at, you may be on a landline. There are a lot of variables there. And we're not always exactly sure that things like apartment numbers and specific addresses are going to come up accurately. So, make sure that you tell them, first and foremost, where you are so that they can start sending help immediately.

The next thing you want to tell them is what's going on. Man's trying to get into my house, man's got a knife, firearm, shots fired, whatever it is. The next thing I advise you to tell them is that you are armed. You want to make sure that that police officer who's responding to the scene knows that the good guy has a firearm. That they don't think just anyone with a gun is immediately a bad guy.

The other thing you want to be able to do, if you can, is describe the bad guy so that, again, the bad guy is recognized by the police when they show up and, certainly, describe yourself. I'm the guy with no hair, with a goatee, with the black shirt with tan pants. That way, if the officer knows, and the dispatcher has told him that that person is armed, and is the good guy, and is the homeowner, that police officer is much more likely to give you that extra second, give you the benefit of the doubt when they see you and not immediately think that you are the bad guy. Now, when that police officer shows up, of course, there's gonna be some direct interaction as well. Let's take a look at how that should play out in a perfect situation when the police officer arrives at your home and you're armed.

The house is clear. Is the homeowner still in the upstairs bedroom? Yes, I believe the police officers in the house now. I don't hear anyone else. I don't know.

Can you have the officer call out for Sally? Yeah, I just wanna make sure it's not the bad guy. Sally, you in there. All right, I heard him, I'm gonna put the phone down. Yes, I'm gonna put the phone down.

Yes, sir! Open the door for me and show your hands. Come to the door and open up. Yes, sir! And show me your hands.

I do not have a firearm. The firearm is not in my hand, sir. Good, where's firearm now, sir. Sir, right there by the television. Okay, okay, down on the ground, put your hands out.

Down on the ground, please. Yes, sir, yes, sir. Put your hands out. Now, as you saw, the idea is to, first and foremost, make sure that the person you're surrendering to and the person that you're coming out of your barricade for is actually a police officer. The way you're gonna do that is going have to either be trusting your gut on what you hear on the other side of the door or, preferably, as you saw, setting up some type of a challenge or a code word with the dispatcher, with the person that you're actually talking to on the phone.

So, ahead of time, just think of what you want them to say. Obviously, I'm not Sally, there isn't a Sally inside of the house. It's very unlikely that the bad guy would actually hear anyone say, oh, have them call Sally. Of course, you're talking into the phone, you're in your barricade area. Now, if you're in an open environment and the bad guy can hear your code phrase, that doesn't work as well.

So, you want to have a code phrase, you want to communicate it to the dispatcher. At any point, you finally believe that there is a police officer on the other side, you're gonna put the phone down, don't hang the phone up, and you're gonna put your firearm down. Now, in a public environment, concealed carry, we always recommend that you take that firearm and put it back into your holster. You may not even have a holster on, you may be woken up in the middle of the night, you may not have any clothing on. You're in a situation where you've got a gun, you've got a phone, that's all we know for sure.

Put the phone down and put the gun down. Put the gun down somewhere that you can back away from it and be clearly away from it when the police officer then is going to come into the room. Don't expect the police officer to come through the room. You might have dead bolts set, you might have barricades that are in place that need to be moved. You exposed yourself to the police officer.

The trick here is that you need to be, at some point, ready to comply with the officer's instructions. Make sure they see your hands. Make sure they know where the firearm is. Make sure that you don't inadvertently put yourself in a position where you can get hurt. And, of course, don't put yourself in a position where you feel compelled to defend yourself against a police officer who's just doing his job.

Interaction with law enforcement is an important part of home defense. So, there you have it, the two active shooter response plans that you should think about and rehearse and be prepared to put into action. Now, we're gonna talk in other sections more about how you train, and how you prepare to execute these plans. But, right now, after this concludes, I want you to look at your next supplemental piece of material, and that's your active shooter response plan signs. You've got some simple signs that you can print out.

You can blow 'em up and make 'em bigger. You can shrink 'em down and make 'em smaller. Put 'em on the backs of the doors in your workplace. Put 'em in your wallet, put 'em in your kid's coat pockets when they go to school, and maybe laminate 'em, maybe protect 'em. But it's really simple.

You want to be able to make sure that you don't forget a step, that you don't think you're helpless, that you don't miss out on an opportunity to avoid a conflict, or win a conflict. Print out those supplemental active shooter response plan cards and put them where you think they're important. Distribute them to people that you care about. Maybe people that would never take a course like this, never carry a gun, and never think about their defense. Just handing them that card that says evade, barricade, and respond if necessary might motivate them to get more prepared, or might plant a seed that saves their life during an active shooter response course.

You want to make sure that your plan works for you and that you share it with as many people as possible.