Unless I quote someone else, these are my opinions and I am not speaking for any organization, including those that I am employed by or a member of.
Many active shooter situations seem to happen in schools and the traditional response is a lockdown. Teachers pack their students into classrooms and wait for further instructions from administrators. Some schools are adding lock down drills to their fire, and earthquake training.
But is a lockdown the best way to protect students from an active shooter inside the building? E. Brian Normandy, the Director of Training & Chief Instructor at Jackson Arms Shooting Range & Training Facility near San Francisco, thinks that it is not.
Normandy believes that students should evacuate and scatter so that they don’t become easy targets for a gunman intent on killing as many students as possible and he has trained his teenage children to pick up the closest heavy object, break a window, get the heck out, and deal with the consequences later.
Do you really want kindergarten through 6th graders scattering to the winds to get away from an active shooter? Well, maybe sixth graders. It really depends on how old and how responsible your children are whether or not they should stay put or try to evacuate.
If you have young students, then a lockdown that follows these guidelines might be the best approach, but Lt. Joe Hendry, an administrative lieutenant at Kent State University, has other ideas for you, like not herding all of your students into one corner where they become easy targets, but having them hide in different locations around the room. Others say that large pads with fluorescent markers can be used to make notes to show to emergency reponders outside.
But what if teachers were able to either protect their students, or safely lead them out of the building? What else can higher education and businesses do to protect their employees from an active shooter inside the building? Next time I’ll talk about Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s take on sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves.
