How to Survive an Active Shooter
What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life
How to Survive an Active Shooter (2nd Edition) is an interview-based book in which an anti-terrorism and security expert answered Jacquelyn Lynn’s questions on what to do if you find yourself in an active shooter situation and more. This is Chapter Two.
What Should You Do When the Unthinkable Happens?
Question: Let’s talk about why it’s so important to know what to do if you find yourself in an active shooter situation. Certainly, it’s good to understand the cultural and political issues that are causing the increase in these incidents, but the primary goal of this book is to teach people how to survive if they find themselves in an unthinkable situation with someone trying to kill them — and as many others as possible. I would think part of the answer to the question of why it’s important to know what to do is because the chances of it happening to you were once so remote, and now they’re not so remote.
Answer: That’s a fair statement. Generally, you have two primary motives for an active shooter.
You have a person who is upset with a situation in a given environment, such as an employer or workplace — the old phrase “going postal” resulted from a lot of postal workers being removed from their jobs. Management gave nothing but negative feedback, attempting to motivate them to leave their jobs. Instead many of them reacted by simply cracking and coming in and killing their co-workers and bosses. That reality still exists in today’s economy and today’s stressors.
The other thing you have is somebody who has demonized everyone of a given category. These are the people who come to a site and decide which people to kill, such as everyone of a certain religion or race. And then you will have situations like the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where you have somebody who had geared himself up with such a hatred for Americans — and I use that term intentionally, I do not believe that the LGBT community was specifically targeted. He wanted to kill Americans; he believed that was his imperative as someone who believed the teachings of Islamic extremist terrorism. That being the case, everyone in that place was his enemy. He wanted to kill as many as he could.
The students at Columbine — it was the same situation. They wanted to kill as many as they could. The man in the Colorado movie theater, the same thing. They had created a demonization of the people and had to kill them.
If you are on the other end, there is no talking your way out of this, there is no reasoning your way out of this. You are facing a person who does not know you, yet hates you with every fiber of his being. How do you deal with that? There are tactics that we will go into on how to handle that situation, but the most important thing you need to understand is that it is a situation you can face and there is no reasoning a way out of it.
Q. That was the same situation with the guy who killed nine people in a church in South Carolina.
A. Whenever you have a gunman who is coming in and attempting to kill mass numbers of people, especially those he does not even know, you are in this mentality: “Someone has done wrong to me and I am building up to hate them, and when I hate them I will destroy them.” That is the mentality they are coming with. You will not become their friend; you will not reason with them. They have come to that conclusion and have come to execute that plan.
Q. So the reality is, once you’re in this situation, you’re not going to be able to talk the perpetrator out of it. You need to accept that, right? What are the keys to being prepared for such a situation before the attack, the shooting, actually begins?
A. There are a couple of things in our society that we don’t really consider as being an issue in surviving an active shooter situation.
The first one is how to react when you see odd behavior. You would typically avert your gaze, you will look away, you will diminish yourself, you will hide from it. The challenge is that you now empower the evil actor by doing so. You are giving him strength by doing that.
The best thing to do is when you see that odd behavior, let him know you are on to him. Make him think that you know what’s in that head of his. Let him believe that someone has found him out. That is the first key to your safety. Be alert and show that you are alert.
Think about the stereotypical movie-based elderly woman with her purse who gets mugged on a street. She’s diminished, she’s hiding herself, she’s crouched down, she’s clutching that bag with fear, she’s looking away from the assailant. The assailant can creep up on her, sneak up behind her, take advantage of her, pick that purse or injure her.
What happens if you reverse the situation? When the would-be assailant sees her, she looks him dead in the eye, and she walks away with a confident stride and posture? What gets changed in the mind of that assailant? “Oh, she can identify me.” “Oh, she knows what I’m up to.” He really wants another target. Unfortunately, we’ve been trained to look away and hide — to allow that targeting to occur. I’m sorry, that’s not the answer to your question.
Q. It’s still good information. But we’re not talking about a street mugger.
A. Anytime you have an active shooter, if they have prepared for the event, they have chosen their target. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, if you ever look at a diagram of it, was a place with no escape route. Everything led to a fenced-in wall and blocked-in area, and the place had been cased by Omar Mateen, the shooter. He knew that the doors had been barred shut, that the one door was not functioning. He came in through the only exit that could have allowed people to retreat. He was shooting fish in a barrel, and he planned that.
Think about the movie theater in Colorado. The shooter researched and found that that particular theater would offer him no opposition, as it was a gun-free zone. He chose it because of that. He wanted the fish-in-a-barrel situation. No one could really get out very well; they were trapped.
So what’s your best answer to be prepared? If you go into a place where you are with a group of people that could be targeted, know your exits, know your path out, know how you are going to leave if you need to. If you can determine multiple paths to exit the situation, then identify at least three of them.
Your first rule will be to flee. We’ll get into this more later, but of course you are not going to flee if while you are in that room and it’s being attacked, your child is in the bathroom and about to come back, or you’re on one side of the building, the people you love are on the other.
You’re going to have some decisions to make. But you need to know where those exits are, no matter what you decide to do. We’ll go into more about what your options are later. Just remember that if you don’t know where the exits are, you’re not likely to be able to get out.
Q. That’s an excellent point. I hadn’t thought about addressing the issue of what to do if, as a situation unfolds, you are separated from people you care about, and you don’t want to abandon them.
A. You’ll have some hard decisions to make, and you’ll have to make them in a flash.
Excerpted from How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life (2nd Edition) by Jacquelyn Lynn. Part of the Conversations series. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever fine books are sold.
