Nurse the Hate: Active Shooter Training

Yesterday morning I attended company mandated “active shooter training”.  A man from Homeland Security came to the conference room and presented the government approved power point while everyone politely watched.  The man making the presentation was bookish and clearly well intentioned.  He was retired military but seemed more like a kindly small town hardware store owner.  He used all the necessary buzzwords to let us know that he was legit.  “Maniac with gun” became “active shooter” and so on.  Various statistics and crime histories were scrolled past us.  There are so many mass shootings now that on many of them I struggled to remember key details.  “Florida?  Was that the one with the guy that fired into the dance floor with an AR-15 or was that the one where he killed a bunch of people sitting at church?”  They have begun to blend together.

The facts are numbing.  Slide after slide.  We learned that there is more than one mass shooting per month now in the United States.  Most incidents last about three minutes on average.  95% of the shooters are male.  Most do not present a clear indication of their intentions beforehand.  A short educational video was presented to help us identify a potential shooter.  It had the same exaggerated tone that all training videos contain.  “Hmm… Maybe something is wrong with Mark…”  We were instructed to call an 800 number if we saw something “unusual or suspicious” around a “soft target”.  The assembled group stared on politely.

Then we came to the meat of the training.  What do you do if you find yourself involved in a situation where a stranger starts shooting people for no reason?  It was a variation of “Stop/Drop/Roll”, in this case “Run/Hide/Fight”.  In case you are unable to be trained by Homeland Security, allow me to fill you in.  Run away.  Hide.  If there’s no choice, fight back with your office equipment.  That’s the plan.  Thanks for coming.

What I found most illuminating was that this room of people allowed the idea of an armed lunatic to become normalized.  At no point did anyone raise their hand and say, “As opposed to me having to plan an exit strategy or hiding place every time I walk into a Dairy Queen, what if we just gathered up all these guns so lunatics can’t rapidly kill dozens of people?’.  Nope.  It was no different than attending the health insurance seminar.  It’s just protocol now.  Diving under your desk to avoid bullets is the same as dealing with co-pay on doctor’s office visits.  Ho-hum. 

As luck would have it, this morning I woke up to find out that a dozen or so people got shot at a bar in California by an “active shooter”.  There is no doubt that the idea will be floated out that “soft targets” like this need to have armed security at all times.  This sounds logical until you realize that any location you can think of can be classified as a “soft target”.  This means each and every one of us will need to pull a shift as an armed security guard in addition to our normal jobs.  Early reports are saying that the security guard at the bar as well as a sheriff’s deputy both were among the victims, but let’s not think about cause/effect of guns in society.  We’ll all feel better if we call them “heroes” instead of “needless casualties”.  Perhaps we can run a montage of their photos at the football game this weekend as a fitting tribute.

The normalization of mass shootings is almost complete.  I heard a news anchor say, without irony, “this is the worst mass shooting in a week”.  The blonde next to him made the tightened lip expression meant to convey suppressed grief mixed with the determination to find the strength to get past this.  Hopes and prayers.  If only there was something that could be done.  Let’s gather in the conference room everyone.  Watch the power point.  Run.  Hide.  Fight.  Fill out your benefits information.  Another day in America.