How to Respond and Recover From an Active Shooter Event

The epidemic of gun violence in our schools and the horrific outcomes are a direct result of mindset. If a school, hospital, church or any place where people gather does not consider security/facility resilience as mission critical they are destined to suffer severe consequences when bad things happen. Unless and until the mindset of “It can’t happen here” is eliminated the outcomes of active-shooter events will be costly. Costly in lives, property, reputation and money.

The payouts associated with these events are reaching astronomical levels. MGM Resorts International, which owns the hotel, Mandalay Bay, the Las Vegas hotel where a gunman opened fire from his room onto a country music festival three years ago, killing 58 and wounding hundreds of others, agreed to pay up to $800 million to settle lawsuits filed by victims.  The payout in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, where a teen gunman murdered 17 of his classmates with a semi-automatic rifle in 2018, exceeded 150 million. Multiple lawsuits have been filed in the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan that killed four students figures to add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. A reasonable person would assume the Uvalde shooting at Robb Elementary School that took the lives of 17 students and two teachers will be the same or worse.

Improvements That Can Save Lives

My hope is to provide some insight into what I have learned while studying these events and many others over the last 10 years. My insights are not meant to be critical but to point out some areas that desperately need improvement.

Let’s start with “Mindset.”  Many people I encounter don’t think an active-shooter event (ASE) can happen here. They are right. Until it does. Then the “box checking” mindset takes over. People who think that they would rise to the occasion are mistaken. People involved in these events almost always fall to their level of training. Even if you and your staff trained until you got it right, you’d most likely fail under the pressure -- you must train until you can’t get it wrong. This concept applies to all three of the components I have identified in my research. Those components are first responders (police fire EMS and city services), on-site civilians (teachers’ students and visitors) and the property stakeholder (school administrators up to and including school boards).

Only one document I’ve found that provides a comprehensive approach to “Plan for, Respond to and Recover” from an active shooter event. That document is NFPA 3000. Professionals have asked why the National Fire Protection Association is getting involved in Active Shooter Events, but there is a simple answer -- no one else has approached this issue with a “Whole Community” mindset. The NFPA document states that the “NFPA 3000 project was initiated through a 2016 request to NFPA from Chief Otto Drozd of Orange County (Florida) Fire and Rescue following the deadly shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Chief Drozd’s request identified the need for a standard to address common preparation among all of the involved first responder units, as well as a unified incident command during an event and common recovery strategies for communities following these events.”

First Responders Need a Coordinated Plan

Considering the legacy and where we are now, let’s start with Law Enforcement. The vast majority of Law Enforcement professionals I know are amazing people. Willing to do a job that gets harder and more dangerous every day. But responding to a mass casualty event that involves children is extremely problematic. When you consider the capabilities of law enforcement you must consider training, equipment and command support. When you consider the challenges our large and small departments face training time is almost non-existent because of the workload, court schedules and budgets. That is compounded by the budget associated with properly equipping every officer with the necessary tools to respond effectively to and Active Shooter Event.

Many lessons were learned in the Columbine shooting in 1999 and numerous new policies and procedures were created. However, to effectively meet the challenges of an active shooter event, personnel require training and equipment. As I stated earlier. if you don’t train until you can’t get it wrong you will fail under pressure. The coordination required between EMS and police is also critical. It was reported in the Parkland shooting that Incident Command did not become a Unified Command until extremely late in the event. As a result, the EMS medics that were on scene were not allowed to enter until well after the scene was secured.

Parkland also clearly shows the failure to properly leverage the electronic technology on-site to provide better situational awareness. The 1200 building where the shooting occurred had a sophisticated video surveillance platform that was an impediment to the first responders because no one knew how to use it. How many times have schools run active shooter training for our first responders, but the on-site technology was an afterthought?

Then consideration must be given to the civilians caught up in the ASE. Have they been trained? Was the training done to check the box or was in done with the idea of building a “survival mindset.”   Are drills run regularly to ensure an effective response? Is it understood and actioned those drills are “hot washed” to ensure they can be improved?

Consider that on any given day there is a mandatory “fire drill” being conducted in a U.S. school and the record shows that there has not been a fatal fire in a U.S. school since 1958. Are those drills being conducted correctly? Are they “options-based” or one size fits all? How many of those drills include an after-action review to confirm that everyone knows how to respond?

It begs the question: Why are schools so unprepared for an active shooter event? Is it budgets, lack of knowledge or simple neglect? Or is it mindset that “it can’t happen here?”

Make the Response Inclusive

The final piece of the response puzzle is the building stakeholder. According to the Educator Week database, there have been 27 mass shootings in US schools in 2022.  If 27 school fires had occurred in that same time period claiming as many young lives would fire safety become a higher priority? What do education stakeholders need to do to reduce the needless loss of life?

The most obvious answer is administrators must accept the fact that while active shooter events may be a low probability, they are high consequence events. Because active shooter events are not the only security challenges schools face, the first step should include a comprehensive Threat and Vulnerability assessment. A good place to begin is employing FEMA’s THIRA/SPR process. Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment is a standardized protocol to evaluate natural, technological and human-caused events. Hazard Mitigation Plans and the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA)/Stakeholder Preparedness Review (SPR) are both critical tools for improving resilience. Both processes assess risks and capabilities for managing risks and potential impacts. In the human-caused category, FEMA calls out Active Shooter and Armed Assailant.

If FEMA calls out Active Shooter and Armed Assailant would a “reasonable person" then assume that the events described could happen to them? One of the most edifying parts of THIRA is the requirement to write a context statement. I believe based on recent history if you wrote a context statement that included multiple children being slaughtered that would be all that was needed to take the next step in the THIRA process.

A Stakeholders Preparedness Review must be based on the context statement detailing what resources you have and what resources you need to “Plan for, Respond to and Recover” from and Active Shooter Event. This allows school administrators and security professionals to identify gaps in the assessment and take the necessary steps to plug those gaps. Time after time I have talked with school administrators and inquired about their Emergency Operation Plan (EOP) or their Emergency Action Plan (EAP). Unfortunately, Numerous plans I have seen are woefully inadequate and generally contain information that is not current.

I found it extremely rare to find a plan that was a collaborative effort that included various diverse fields of expertise, including a provider of security technology. This oversight results in technology being ignored in the response plan, and sadly, hinders its proper deployment when it is absolutely needed the most. Far too many students have been shot and subsequently died from blood loss because the scene assessment didn’t provide real-time situational awareness.

Summary

The first thing that must occur in our schools is accepting the fact that an Active Shooter Event can happen here. We must look at all of the potential threats that may well impact a facility and prioritize a response realistic and workable plan. The plan must also consider other potential threats and how preparing for one may be helpful in preparing for all. The plan that is created today must be reviewed and updated annually utilizing the most recent data and procedures available.

In this article, I have not mentioned prevention. Prevention seems to be beyond our reach. So many mistakes were made in the Oxford shooting.  Had the school district simply followed the best practices laid out by the United States Secret Service “Preventing School Shooting,” published in 2018 and since updated twice, the aberrant behavior of the shooter would have been recognized and stopped before he fired the first round. This is a difficult subject mired in emotion, political posturing and eminence suffering but a subject that must be addressed now. If prevention is not the endgame, then formulating a comprehensive risk assessment and security plan must suffice for now.