Defending against the next Virginia Tech

Now that a lot more detail on the Virginia Tech incident has been released, including information recorded by the murderer himself, we can turn our attention to how to deal with such an event in the future. By all accounts, there were enough warning signs in place that this guy should have been recognized and forced into psychological treatment well before he snapped and started his well-planned killing spree. However, a reliable mechanism for identifying such individuals and then getting them to the proper help does not exist. So this is the part that is in the hands of our governments, state and federal, to address. It is a complicated subject and will require lots of work to deal with. Your elected officials will be afraid to take this on, as there will be a lot of opposition from various civil rights and privacy advocacy groups in the process. I predict that no one will touch it.

So that leaves us on the doorstep of dealing with the next attack ourselves. As I’ve said before, no one can guarantee your own safety better than you. The Police have no responsibility to protect the individual. They are purely reactive and do little to prevent violent crime such as this. In the active shooter scenario, the best they can do is get as many officers as possible to secure a perimeter around the area to contain the killer and then send in a team of trained officers, such as a SWAT or SRT unit, to methodically clear the building. Unlike what Hollywood likes to portray, this process can take quite a bit of time to put together. Interestingly enough, our Canadian neighbors have had some nasty school shootings themselves; despite strict gun control laws I might add. The current policy of many of their Police agencies is that the first officer on scene grabs his rifle and quickly enters the building in an effort to locate and stop the shooter as quickly as possible. I applaud them for this policy as it is the only sensible Police response to an active shooter incident. The down side is that it puts that first officer’s life in great jeopardy, so it becomes imperative that all patrol officers receive training on building clearing tactics so they have the best chance of survival and success in the mission.

Let’s get right down to the heart of the matter. Imagine that you are sitting in your Monday morning college class on the second floor of the building. The professor is lecturing and you are still thinking about all the fun you had over the weekend, mixed with the stress of the upcoming finals and the papers you still need to get finished. Perhaps you have a sporting event coming up next weekend. Perhaps you have a date. Maybe you’re one of those who listens intently to every word the instructor says while you follow along in the book and fill it with six different colors of highlighter based on your own little super-organized color coding system…

Pop! Pop! Pop! You suddenly hear this random popping noise from down the hall followed by screams and yells muffled by the walls and distance. If you’re like 99% of Americans, you do nothing. Just sit there looking at the door wondering what is going on and waiting for more information on the subject. At this point, you’re not involved and you’d rather keep it that way. This is somebody else’s problem. If you are one of the masses who only knows the sound of gunfire from a Hollywood movie or the war coverage on the evening news, then you probably don’t even recognize what real-life gunfire inside a large building sounds like. You have been desensitized to violence over the last 20 years of TV and movies, so your natural fight or flight mechanism has not yet kicked in and you do not recognize the imminent danger. You look to the faces of your classmates and professor for some sign that there is an easy explanation to this.

More popping and more screams emanate from down the hall. Finally, that one-percenter in the room or perhaps the professor who has the leadership role in the room goes and opens the door to look out and see what’s going on. In one shining example of selflessness at Virginia Tech, the professor recognizes the danger and tells all the students to bail out the windows while he blocks the door with his body. He is murdered in cold blood, but not before he has successfully saved the lives of every single one of his students. It is pure, unbridled leadership and fearlessness in the face of danger. As we find out later, this was not the most dangerous situation this Holocaust survivor has been through in his life. It is a sad way for our society to lose a great man, but we should be in awe of the fact that his quick action saved a classroom full of students. In another case, several students realize the danger and barricade the door with tables. When the murderer arrives and attempts to force it open, they push back on the other end of a table preventing him from entering. He fires a couple bullets through the center of the door, but then moves on down the hall, leaving everyone in that room alive. In rooms where the killer has entered and shot up numerous students, several make their last ditch effort at survival by “playing dead”. For many this was an effective enough ploy to save them.

Several of those who were faced with this challenge were able to overcome their fear and make quick decisions that saved lives, even if only their own. What would you do? In my years of working in the public emergency services sector, I have found that most people are self-serving and will only do what they must to save themselves. But there is a small segment of our American culture that will go out of their way to help others in the face of danger. I don’t pretend to understand what it is in this group that makes them care for others over themselves. Many of these people go into professions where they are constantly helping others, such a Firemen, Paramedics, Police Officers, or Nurses. Others become leaders within their chosen professions. They are generally the first to volunteer to offer a helping hand to other people in need.

A sliver of this ability resides in many people who don’t necessarily practice it daily. Maybe they become so wrapped up in their own little lives that they forget about the greater good. But when faced with an life-and-death situation, sometimes they are able to push their own well-being back and extend a hand to another in greater need than themselves. We witness this occasionally, such as during a major hurricane or a catastrophic terrorist attack on several American icons. People reach deep within themselves to overcome the fear and extend that helping hand. If only we could find a way to teach everyone to act this way all the time, we might be able to stomp out the evil which roams amongst us every day.

So here you are, sitting in that class, the sounds of gunfire moving closer and closer. For sake of argument, let’s say that your professor doesn’t have a solid leadership ability and you have none of those one-percenters in your class today. What can you do? You have seconds to react. Will you try to save yourself or will you try to save everyone? It’s hard to know how you will deal with this decision ahead of time. There is a key physical mechanism you must take into consideration.

In such a sudden high stress scenario, you will enter what is commonly called the fight or flight response. This is the activation of your sympathetic nervous system. If you’re not a public speaker, you may have experienced this in Speech 101 or perhaps you have encountered this when suddenly faced by an angry dog. Physically, you will have dilation of the pupils, dry mouth, opened airway, rapid heart rate, shutdown of the digestive tract, release of glucose by the liver, release of epinephrine and norepinephrine by the kidneys, relaxed bladder, and a constricted rectum. The body is preparing itself for physical injury. The first reaction by most is to run. With proper mental conditioning, this flight response can be converted to a fight response. In some cases, running is the appropriate action, in others you may be better off to fight. We cannot make a generalization that will fit every situation you might encounter.

In our current scenario, you are trapped in a room where flight is difficult at best. If you do run, you may save yourself, but you will save no one else. If you fight, you may sacrifice yourself and still not save anyone else. I didn’t say this was an easy problem to solve, but here are some things to think about. First, as long as you allow evil to have the upper hand, he will win. You must make your position stronger than his. You are not alone in that class. Shear numbers can easily overtake a single gunman. This concept has been used in warfare for centuries where armies would pile up the bodies, but keep pushing toward the enemy to overwhelm their resources. So let’s look at some tactics that a group of unarmed victims can use against a single gunman inside a school building.

First, get everyone together. Someone must take a leadership role and get everyone working toward the same goal. There are often natural leaders that step into this position, whether it be the quarterback from the football team or the president of the student union, someone must step up and lead. Next, take an inventory of what tools you have to work with. In this case we can assume a typical college room with tables and chairs, but think beyond this case as well. What if this happened at your office building, factory, or warehouse? What tools do you have? What can be used as weapons? What can be used as defenses? In the classroom scenario, access to the room is usually limited to a single door. Is it solid or does it have a window? Most classroom doors have large windows in them, making them very weak as far as security is concerned.

Here is your first critical decision and will be largely based on how much time you have and how many people you have- hide or fight. If you are short on time and maybe don’t have the group of people who are able to physically fight, then you might consider hiding in order to save the group. Lock the door and shut off the lights. Most of the schools I’ve been to have locks on all the classroom doors, so if you are able to, just lock the door. If you have a door stop lying there, place that under the door as well. If he breaks the glass to unlock the door he will have problems pushing the door open against the door stop, giving you the needed distraction to attack. After you have the door locked and the lights off, get everyone to line up on the wall adjacent to the door so they cannot be seen through the window. Get them all quiet and wait for the killer to try your door and move on.

The backup plan must be in place as well. You should have anyone capable of fighting nearest to the door. The first one or two need to have a weapon. Any long, heavy object can be used as a club. In the absence of anything else, that thousand page text book may now be worth the money you paid for it. If he manages to break his way into the class, wait until he is struggling to push the door open and gets far enough that you can see his head, and then attack him with as much violence of action as you can muster up. Strike him on the head and face rapidly and repeatedly to disorient him and get him into a reaction mode instead of an aggressor mode. Now it is the bad guy who is in fight or flight mode and you are running the show. It is now extremely important that you and anyone else capable of helping tackle him and get control of his firearms as quickly as possible. Once you start the attack, he may respond by firing blindly back at you. Since he is now reactionary, he will not be able to aim and there is a better chance that he will miss, but this is why you need to carry your attack through until he is subdued and disarmed. Every round he fires must land somewhere, so your mission is to stop him from shooting, at any cost. You are the defensive line on a full force blitz.

That is the basic tactical plan for the hide response, but if the locked door stops him and he moves on, others will die even though your class was saved. So the alternative is to plan to fight. There are a couple basic methods that we can consider here. Either you go to him, or let him come to you. As a general rule, you will always do better if you take a defensive position and take control of the environment for your fight. You’ll need to quickly position your defenders and assign each one a specific task. Since he is armed with a long range weapon and you are not, you’ll have to ensure that your first contact is going to be a surprise attack within arms reach of whatever handheld weapons you can collect. Now you’ll need to position your people close to the door, but hidden from view. Once he is in the room a pre-determined distance, mount a multi-angled attack. Consider having the first move being a distraction, such as someone further away throwing a text book at him. Once he turns in reaction to that, the rest of your defensive line must quickly and violently attack with everything they can. Tackle him and secure his weapons swiftly. Once he is disarmed, maintain physical control of him and immediately call 9-1-1 and report to the Police your location and that you have subdued the attacker. Move his weapons away from him and place them in the open on a table or the floor. When the Police come in, you do not want anyone to be holding a weapon. All students not required to maintain control of him should be immediately evacuated from the room so the Police have fewer people to deal with.

There are great personal risks involved here, and a chance that someone could still get shot in the fight. However, by mounting a full force attack on this guy and taking him out of action, you will be saving everyone else in the building. Now there is one other option that should only be considered if you have a small group of tough people who are capable of pulling it off. This might be a group of physical athletes, such as members of the football team. You go stop him before he gets to you. This is very dangerous, but I feel it is worthy of discussion as it also carries the greatest chance of stopping the shooter at the earliest opportunity, thereby saving even more lives.

This is a reaction that must be swiftly put into play. You hear the shooting going on down the hall. Gather your team and arm yourselves with whatever you can. Quick peek out the door and around corners to be sure you don’t run into the shooter face-to-face. Your preference is to come up behind the shooter right after he has entered a room, or to quietly sneak up behind him in a hallway. In this case you are going to mount a blind-sided attack. Often, this can be in the form of a full force tackle by a couple big guys, and then wrestle the weapons from him as quickly as you can. If done correctly, this is the best method of fighting him anyway, but it carries a great danger in that if he sees you coming before you are close enough, you are an easy target. If you carry something that can be thrown at him, like that text book, you can hit him or at least force him to react allowing you to cover that last distance before he can accurately shoot at you. This is often called the 21-foot rule by the Police, as you can run at least 21 feet faster than he can bring a gun up to fire an aimed shot. A thrown object will surprise him enough that he can’t be accurate with his return fire allowing your defensive line to complete the blitz. If you have enough people, he may be able to shoot one or two, but will be overpowered by the numbers and you will win in the end.

Now one final tactical point that I want to make has to do with disabling the gun. When you get into the final wrestling match, get a hand over the top of the gun. You want to cover the ejection port on a semi-auto pistol with a death grip. If he manages to pull the trigger, it will fire once, but the ejecting casing will not clear the gun, blocking the action and the gun will not load another round, thereby making it useless. If he has a revolver or an exposed hammer on the back of a semi-auto, adjust this death grip so that part of your hand is between the hammer and the frame, or if the hammer is forward, right on top of it so that your hand falls between the hammer and frame when he tries to fire it. This will prevent the gun from firing at all. In either case, you must hold that death grip no matter what he tries to do with the gun. It will probably hurt, but don’t let go. You can also control where the muzzle is pointing and ensure that it is not pointed toward anyone while you are wrestling around on the ground. This guy had two guns, so it would be necessary to have a separate person do this with each one, while at least one or two others work on subduing the rest of his body. Once he is disarmed, if you know how, remove the magazine and lock the slide to the rear. If you don’t know how, don’t try to figure it out. In either case, keep your finger well away from the trigger, keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction and toward the floor, and go place the gun on a table and keep everyone else away from it until the Police arrive. No matter what, do not hold on to the gun while waiting for the Police as they may mistake you for the bad guy when they come in.

Once the bad guy is subdued, do not under any circumstances punish, injure, or attempt to retaliate against him. Use only the necessary force to keep him from escaping. If you have him on the floor, do not sit on top of him with him on his belly as this may cause suffocation. It is now up to the Justice system to determine his punishment. You have arrested him and his health is now your legal responsibility. Any injury he suffers while in your custody can come back to haunt you later.

Now I felt it was important to explore this subject, because we will never be able to prevent every act of workplace or school violence such as what happened at Virginia Tech. If you have at least thought about what can be done, you have a better chance of putting the pieces together if you were ever involved in something like this. Your safety is your responsibility, so ensure it by taking some proactive steps in planning and preparing for a violent encounter. Discuss this stuff with your friends and the co-workers or classmates that you could count on during such a crisis. Become your own protection by learning how to defend yourself.