Fine. The gun nuts are nuts. The NRA is fucked. Ted Nugent is fucking nuts. Don’t listen to them.

It seems to be accepted that it’s OK for police to have guns. We seem to be alright with the notion of relegating our protection and safety to them. We consider them the experts. Everyone I speak with and hear from that’s anti-gun seems to agree with the above. So let’s go with that premise. (BTW, I started writing this before the PoliceOne survey came out, and frankly in light of that, I think that survey and this article go together to say maybe we should consider what the police have to say, instead of Joe Biden; you know, people that have a clue instead of those that don’t).

How do the police react to mass shootings?

The speed and deadliness of recent high-profile shootings have prompted police departments to recommend fleeing, hiding or fighting in the event of a mass attack, instead of remaining passive and waiting for help.

That’s from the New York Times. I’ll be using bits of the full article throughout. The article continues:

The shift represents a “sea change,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which recently held a meeting in Washington to discuss shootings like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo.

The traditional advice to the public has been “don’t get involved, call 911,” Mr. Wexler said, adding, “There’s a recognition in these ‘active shooter’ situations that there may be a need for citizens to act in a way that perhaps they haven’t been trained for or equipped to deal with.”

The change started after Columbine. Traditional response was to have everyone assemble outside, set of a command post, wait for backup, wait for SWAT, then go on. All that waiting? Too much time. It allowed too much time for more people to be killed. It allowed too much time for more damage and death to be done. It was unacceptable to wait. Police procedure changed to the whole “first responder” concept, that whomever gets there first you must engage swiftly and immediately. Yes we’d all like to wait for backup, but who knows when that’s coming. We do know “you” are here now, and if you don’t act immediately then more people will die. And it tends to work out in the modern “active shooter” scenario because in the majority of cases the moment any sort of resistance appears, the shooter offs themselves. However we get them to stop, they stop and that’s the goal. Thus, we must respond and act as quickly as possible.

It’s about time we stopped preaching that the correct response is to be a victim and “just give them what they want” (but then, isn’t that what modern social thought and politics is all about?).

But to Mr. Wexler’s last point… “they haven’t been trained for or equipped to deal with”. There are ways to remedy that, and I’ll discuss them later on.

The article continues:

Research on mass shootings over the last decade has bolstered the idea that people at the scene of an attack have a better chance of survival if they take an active stance rather than waiting to be rescued by the police, who in many cases cannot get there fast enough to prevent the loss of life.

In an analysis of 84 such shooting cases in the United States from 2000 to 2010, for example, researchers at Texas State University found that the average time it took for the police to respond was three minutes.

I’ve discussed this point many times: we cannot yet bend the laws of space and time, so it still takes time for other people to get here. But do you know who is “here” right now? You.

So if a “bad thing” is happening “right here right now”, who do you think is the person able to respond first? YOU! Police arriving are technically the second responders… well, that is if you respond at all. If you curl up in a ball and wait to be murdered, well…. I guess that’s a response. But you can choose to die, or you can choose to not die.

In the absence of a police presence, how victims responded often made the difference between life and death, Dr. Blair said….  “The take-home message is that you’re not helpless and the actions you take matter,” Dr. Blair said. “You can help yourself and certainly buy time for the police to get there.”

Emphasis added. Dr. Blair’s study shows how people’s choices made a difference. Those that chose to be a “fish in a barrel” died. Those that chose to flee or fight, lived. Some even chose sacrifice of their own lives, to buy time for others to flee and live. Your choices matter and affect not only if you live or die or if others live or die. This is what we’ve learned and can see by studying all the mass shootings we’ve had so far.

Your Actions and Choices Matter

As further example of how your choices — and preparation — matter:

Kristina Anderson, 26, who was shot three times during the Virginia Tech attack, said that every situation is different but that she thinks it can help for people to develop a plan for how they might act if a mass shooting occurred.

“Everywhere I go now, I think about exits and doorways and potential places to hide and things to barricade and fight back with,” Ms. Anderson said. “Some person has to take action and lead.”

Instead of using her victim-status as a way to lobby for increased victimhood, Ms. Anderson has learned and grown from her experience. She doesn’t live in a fantasy world. She doesn’t live in “condition white”. When she goes somewhere, she looks for exits, she looks for ways to be able to manage the situation, should it happen again. Paranoid? If you want to define it that way, I guess. I think she’s a person that went through a horrible experience, is wiser for the wear, and realizes that even something with a remote chance still has a chance and it would be horrible to be caught in (again), so she’d rather not. She’d rather be prepared for what life may bring. Think how much better off she and others could have been if they knew before what they know now. So perhaps, be wise yourself and learn from her experience instead of repeating the mistakes of others.

So yes, fighting may be the right solution. Some people cannot fathom that, but I think it’s only because of the societal structure we’ve created. I know it, I was raised in it. We learned early on that “you don’t hit other people”. That hitting is wrong and not the way to solve problems. When I first became a parent, I preached the same mantra. But eventually I realized my hypocrisy in teaching this to my children, when I spent time learning martial arts and firearms and so on (because my wife had been sexually assaulted, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again) — I understood that sometimes you have to hit, that sometimes you have to engage in violence because the cost of not engaging in it could be worse. So I no longer teach or say “it’s not/never OK to hit”. Instead, I teach that it’s important to give the appropriate response. If your sibling took your cookie away, no, hitting them is not the appropriate response. If someone is trying to rape you, hitting them is a very appropriate response. What we need to shift in our culture is to accept that violence is OK, appropriate, and even our duty to utilize under the right circumstances. We need to stop  understand when it’s right to utilize.

Susan Riseling, chief of police at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said the Virginia Tech episode changed her thinking about how to advise students because it was clear that Mr. Cho had “one goal, and that seemed to be to kill as many people as possible before ending his life.”

The department’s video, screened during training sessions around the state but not available online, tells students to escape or conceal themselves if possible, but if those options are not available, to fight. In the video, students are shown throwing a garbage can at an attacker and charging at him as a group.

“If you’re face to face and you know that this person is all about death, you’ve got to take some action to fight,” Chief Riseling said.

So according to Police Chief Riseling, here’s one of those right circumstances. Remember, the premise here is that the police are our protectors, they are the people our society grants such authority to, and we defer to as the experts on such matters. Thus if the experts and the authority are saying we should react this way… maybe we should listen.

Appropriate Response

Consider however that it’s again about appropriate response. The appropriate response may well be to flee. None if this negates the “beer & TV maxim“; in fact, it flat out encourages the maxim! You are certainly going to be able to enjoy more beer and TV if the best response for the situation is to flee! Your goal is to live, and if fleeing is the right thing to do, then do it. In fact, sometimes the right response might be to just give them your wallet. Say you have a dummy wallet with $5 and some fake cards on it; you throw that at the mugger and take off. You live. Is that a wrong response?

The thing is, a lot of folks are going to assume my solution is: get a gun. That we all should have guns, and bring back the OK Corral. Well, I do agree that firearms are useful tools and sometimes it’s the right and only tool appropriate for the task. But I am also aware that you cannot play golf with only one club in the bag (thank you, Tom).

Pepper spray can be a useful tool. It’s not necessarily going to stop an attacker, but if it enables you the window you need to escape, then it’s an appropriate and useful tool.

You know what’s even more useful? Awareness. Instead of having your head down in your iPhone and your ears plugged up with music, keep your eyes open, up, and scanning around; keep your ears listening for things. Do you know what most criminals want? an easy target. Do you know what most people say after an attack? “They just came out of nowhere.” No they didn’t, but it only seemed that way because you were unaware, they knew it, they took advantage of it.

Awareness can be even more mundane. When you enter a new building or room, look for the exits. Rather, look for the OTHER exits. Everyone knows about the exit they came in through; consequently, if something bad happens — like a fire — everyone stampedes for the door they came in. There have been more than enough stories of hundreds of people dying in club fires because everyone tried to go out the door they came in (dead bodies piled at the front door), but the back and side entrances were empty. It costs you nothing but a few seconds to find the exits, it doesn’t impede your life, and if something bad happens well… those few seconds spent are sure going to enable your life.

Do you have any medical training? Can you handle basic first aid like burns, cuts, bee stings, heat exhaustion, shock? Can you handle slightly larger issues like severe bleeding, broken bones? CPR? Heimlich Maneuver? (shout out to my buds at Lone Star Medics). If someone is choking, bleeding, or otherwise on their way to dying, again YOU are “right here right now”, YOU are the first responder. It will take time to dial 911, talk to an operator, talk to a dispatcher, convey all the information, get an ambulance dispatched, for them to fight traffic and drive to your location, to park, to come in, to assess the situation and orient themselves, then to act. It all takes time, time that may not be available to the suffering person. But what can you who is right there right now do to help?

Being Trained and Equipped to Deal With It

So this isn’t about “having a gun”. It’s about having a lot of things. It’s about being prepared. As Mr. Wexler stated at the top:

There’s a recognition… there may be a need for citizens to act in a way that perhaps they haven’t been trained for or equipped to deal with.

No one is asking you to be a hero. No one is asking you to rush in and save the day. What is being asked is to accept that the world can be full of unexpected unpleasant undesirable things. Many of these things are time-critical, where the first response is vital, and since those “right there right now” are the ones that can respond first, wouldn’t the world be a better place if citizens perhaps were trained and equipped to deal with those situations? Be it training in first aid and equipped with that knowledge and a small med kit in their purse, or training in how to run and equipped with a good pair of Nikes so you could flee, or in knowledge of how to operate a handgun and equipped with the right tools and mindset for its use.

There’s this notion of “finding common ground”. There’s this lip-service to “meeting us halfway”. To that, I offer this. We appreciate “first responders” because we know the first people on the scene are the ones that will save lives. That lives are saved because people have the knowledge, skill, and ability to act swiftly in the face of a bad situation. That the sooner the responders can respond, the better the chances are of lives being saved. That when it gets down to it, the person “right here right now” is truly the first person able to respond. Thus, shouldn’t we all work to be able to be a first responder? How you choose to respond, that’s up to you. But at least let’s come to find common ground on the premise that first response is vital to life, and there’s no one that can respond faster than those immediately there. There’s no one that can respond faster than you.