Active Shooter Response Session 7: Training to Respond to an Active Shooter

The next part of the course might be the most important. Now that you have all this information, what are you gonna do with it? How are you gonna train it to implement your response plan, you've got a lot of ideas in your head, and probably a lot of them seem disconnected, or maybe optional, maybe you're not sure which ones are gonna apply to you, your family or your setting. Well, that's part of the reality of active shooter response. It's not like home defense, where you know that this is where your front door is, you know where your gun is staged, you probably have some good ideas about where your family's most likely to be and the directions where the bad guys most likely to come from.

In an active shooter situation, it's much less likely you'll have that information. Even in your workplace. If your workplace is the type to be targeted by a spree killer, there's probably so many variables that you can't be sure where you'll be, where the bad guy is coming from, or even who will be around. When you think about the active shooter response training concepts, what you wanna do is really start from the premise of where you are now, research, educate yourself. And if you're going to try to implement your plan with other people, whether it be your family or your co workers, or other people that you find yourself traveling with quite often, you wanna make sure that they do the research as well.

Give them an opportunity to contribute, it would be great if they took this active shooter response course. But it's also going to be good if they go out and read whatever articles they can find or collect whatever ideas, they may be able to come across and then bring to the table when you take the next step, which is to discuss your plan. Now, if you're the only one who's really done the research, and you're the only one who's really become educated on the topic, you've successfully completed this active shooter response course. Now you're going to discuss with other people and share your knowledge with them. Remember that it is truly a discussion, you don't wanna just come out there and say, here's your emergency response card, it was one of our supplemental handouts.

And this is all you need to know. You wanna make sure that they internalize the information, and that you guys do compare notes and ask and answer questions of each other. Someone may be concerned about the fact that you carry a gun, they may wanna ask you well, wait a minute, do you really trained to use that gun in a situation like a crowd situation? And then of course, you'll be able to answer it, maybe someone's gonna ask you what they should do in the event that you draw your gun. And they're gonna ask you should they run away, hide in the corner, stand behind you and grab your belt.

And you're gonna have some ideas because you've studied in this course, and you've been to the range and you've practiced, you wanna maybe talk to them about what their ideas are, or their concerns are as well. So you're gonna be asking questions in this discussion. So first you do the research, you get educated, then you discuss this with the other people that might be involved in the execution of your active shooter response plan. After that, the best thing to do is to go ahead and just visualize how it's gonna play out for the areas where you're spending time, where you work, or the kinds of areas that you might visit that would be subject to a spree killer, or active shooter type attack, movie theaters, amusement parks, shopping malls, metropolitan areas that have heavy populations, and a lot of internal transportation issues. You wanna talk about bus stations, you wanna talk about airports, maybe you wanna talk about something like a port or a harbor, maybe you go on cruises quite often.

And that cruise ship itself might become the place where the spree attack happens, if you stay in large hotels, especially resort hotels, this would also be a place where you might have a spree killer. Think about how you would respond how you would implement your plan in those areas. And this really is a visualization exercise. And it's something that everyone in your group, everyone in your family should participate in, have everyone visualize what they would do, if they found themselves walking down a crowded city street, if they found themselves at an airport terminal? What would you do if you were in your workplace where you have 2000 workers that come and go over three shifts?

What would you do if you were in the parking lot? What would you do if you were in the HR section, have everyone visualize their roles, have everyone visualize what they would do, whether they were with you, separated, or your entire group was together. The next thing you wanna do is actually go ahead and do a walkthrough, you wanna go ahead and see if the movements if the actions that you've thought about doing see if they're actually applicable, right, maybe you've told someone in your family to pick up a stool and pick up a chair, pick up something heavy in the restaurant. And the minute they try to pick up a chair, well, they've never trained they never thought about using a stool as an improvised tool an improvised weapon, they pick it up and they really just don't have any idea what to do with it. They're picking it up by the heavy end maybe and swinging the light end.

Maybe they need to understand how to use leverage how to grab a stool, a chair, how to pick up a mop, whether they should hold the mop end or hold the non mop end and swing them up at somebody. Well, just getting those things in their hands, getting those ideas to become reality that's gonna help you figure out what people's capabilities are. And it might also help you motivate them to train and to spend more time thinking about not just improvised defensive tools, but defensive tools that they can carry with them every day. Maybe the firearm, maybe the knife, maybe the chemical or electrical device, whatever it may be. So doing a walk through actually going through the actions can be incredibly important.

Once you've gone through the actions, you've thought about looking for exits, you've thought about the types of places you're gonna go, you visualize using an exit that isn't common in a restaurant such as going through that restaurant kitchen area the places where employees only go, the next thing you wanna do, especially in your workplace. And any other environment that you can get to is think about having a drill. Now, the drills shouldn't be one that alarms customers or alarms people in your workplace that don't know what's going on. But certainly even your family could go to the mall and have a drill, you could tell everybody like, hey, sometime the next month, we know we go to the movie theater, every couple weeks, we go shopping, you know, once a week at the grocery store, we go to the mall every once in a while to pick up some supplies. Everybody probably has cell phones in your family if they're capable of being part of an active shooter response plan.

If they're not, you know, the six year old that's always gonna be with mom or dad or the big sister. If people go off on their own. And you think about being able to just send a text message that says, you know, active shooter drill, make sure it's a drill. And then you have everyone do what it was you planned on doing. Use the exits, not where they're not supposed to be, not causing a ruckus, not actually calling 911, not running through the mall.

But think about getting back together. Think about barricading. Think about meeting up in a corner of a mall store and think about where you would hide, think about what you would do in the grocery store. And then of course, the drill could also include the idea of what improvised defensive tools are in the area. If you found yourself in a public restroom, for example, what do you have in there that could barricade the door?

What other things you have in there that you could fight with? Is their liquid soap or their liquid soap dispensers? Could you undo one of those and throw the liquid soap on the floor that tile floor so that when the bad guy comes in, he might lose his footing, he might go to turn around the corner to find you and slip end up on the ground and make him an easier target for you to stop to get control of his weapon and control of his body. What things exist in the environment once you actually go do these walkthroughs and do these drills. And of course they're much easier in the workplace to do.

What opportunities do you find and what deficiencies did you find in your plan? This will help you refine and rehearse the plan that you wanna put into place. Ultimately, if you are in control of an environment that is likely to be part of a spree killing event or could be targeted for one, or if you have the influence to make sure that in your workplace, people that are responsible for that area take this issue seriously, you can build all the way up to full blown scenarios. Those scenarios may also include law enforcement or emergency medical personnel from your community. Certainly, this is something that more and more schools are doing across the country, just like they have fire drills, they now have full blown scenarios for active shooter response that involve at least the staff.

And sometimes the students. These full on scenarios were really set in stone, the plan and the rehearsal that you need, so that you can just hit play on that script and execute your active shooter response plan in that worst case scenario moment without really having to think about it. It will also shake out any deficiencies or mistakes, or assumptions that were flawed when you were putting your plan into place. After the scenario, what do we do then? Have we stopped?

Absolutely not. The next thing we're gonna do is run more drills. And those drills, of course can be spaced out over time. So the idea is to do the research, learn what you can, talk about it with the other people that this plan would involve, visualize the execution of that plan, and then do a walkthrough with the individual components of the plan. Do a drill every once in a while make sure that you're actually able to put this plan into place.

And if you can run a full blown scenario to really pressure test this plan. And then after you run the scenario and you refine your plan, you go back to drilling and the drilling may be every month. It may be every quarter, it may be once a year. But the more frequently and realistically you can train and practice your plan, the more likely you are to be able to put it into play efficiently and appropriately during that spree killer active shooter event.