What? You’re supposed to return fire! Actively shoot the Active Shooter. Sure, when everybody’s armed, that could be problematic, but if in doubt shoot the black one. It’s better to be sorry than safe.
OK so this is great an all, but it reminds me of the last episode of Still Buffering. The 15 year old high school student and co-host of the show has had active shooter training in her school that is the same type of advice. This was after a student was apprehended with explosives and weaponry the Sunday before what authorities suspect was the day he would have shot up the school. It’s pretty crazy when training to run, hide, fight are taught along with using the school phones to report the location of the shooter to classrooms; and it’s the same ALICE program presented by the Washington Post.
I know it’s still a relatively rare event, but it was interesting to hear a very emotional response from the show without directly addressing the politics.
I’m afraid I’m more of a passive shooter; I’m not much good in those situations unless the attacker points my gun at himself and squeezes my hand on the trigger.
…I wonder if the guy who did Get Your War On is up to anything.
I ran in to a passive-aggressive shooter once. He wasn’t actually armed, a fact he managed to make me simultaneously feel bad and a little angry about.
This is extremely close to the training I had to take at work for dealing with active shooter situations. A lot of breath is spent detailing how fighting back is a last resort option and how bringing weapons into the workplace for defense is not an acceptable option (in such a way that it makes one believe this is the actual goal of the training).
I assume they’re just parroting some study that looked into these situations and dreamed up some things to try that have zero practicality in a real life situation.
WOW! Run away and hide under something?
I better write that down as I’m probably not going to remember this.
I can’t help but think that the dude on the left…
…is wielding one of these noisemakers.
Whiteboard eraser. Dry erase marker residue will really leave a mess on the shooter’s dark pants!
Thing is, if you start to shoot during an active shooter situation, you become an active shooter. If the police arrives when you’re still pointing a gun at someone, they could very well take you down because they think you’re one of the “bad” shooters.
Also, you don’t have the training to handle a firearm during an active shooter situation (unlike the police, who obviously train for this situation). You could very well end up getting innocent people killed (bystanders, other “good-guys-with-guns”, police officers).
Something about the “hide” image just reminds me of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park.
Come to think of it, most of these infographics can be replaced by stills from that scene…
Bit reminiscent of this classic:
This one is concerning, not new, but concerning…
I know there’s very little time for situational assessment sometimes, but the idea that the civilians should need to literally HIDE the weapon from sight, as if the law enforcement team is just going to be triggered (no pun intended) and begin shooting anything gun-shaped in the room…
Already several years old but this story pretty much destroys the “good guy with a gun” fallacy.
One thing I learned from proofreading too many mediocre mystery novels is never touch the murder weapon. You’d be amazed at how many fictional plots depend on an innocent bystander leaving their fingerprints in stupid places. Remember folks, never touch the murder weapon!
Unfortunately, it would appear that both in Columbine and Orlando, part of the police training was “don’t go in there until much much later.” We know people in Columbine bled to death after the shooters were dead because the cops wouldn’t go in; at this point there’s no way to know how many seriously wounded on the dance floor might have been saved if the cops had gone in to the main building once they knew the killer was locked inside a bathroom.
Hostage training is always “don’t go in until you have some idea what you’re going in to.” Ground plans, research, scouting teams, you do some homework, find out what you’re up against and work the problem. Are you going in on ten guys with guns or just one? Are they dressed in some manner to be able to identify them or do they look like a hostage. Police actually handcuff everyone that they come up against inside, innocent or guilty, just to get a hold of the situation because their job is to limit the situation.
It’s basically hard to make the call for a hostage vs. active shooter situation and if they always enter guns blazing on hostage situations it won’t go well. There’s no way to know how many hostages they’ve save through negotiations through the years, do we throw all that out when we don’t know the situation yet?
Dude on the right is about to chuck a $500 Eames shell chair with an Eifel base.
In case anyone was wondering.
I’d love to see this study replicated by university standards. However, I’m pretty sure the institutional review board would’ve not only outright rejected the proposal but also vocally questioned the sanity of the would-be principal investigators who wrote it.
