Active shooters in schools: The enemy is denial
Preventing juvenile mass murder in American schools is the job of police officers, school teachers, and concerned parents
“How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50 years... How many? Zero. That’s right. Not one single kid has been killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?”
So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman , a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology professor, and without a doubt the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace Officers Association , was held in the auditorium of a very large community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.
Grossman’s talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law enforcement — the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others — but violence among and against children was how the day began, and so I'll focus on that issue here.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, pictured with PoliceOne Editor-in-Chief Doug Wyllie, spoke before a crowd of more than 250 police officers in an event hosted by the California Peace Officers Association. (PoliceOne image)
Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student
“In 1999,” Grossman said, “school violence claimed what at the time was an all time record number of kids’ lives. In that year there were 35 dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say, ‘ That’s the year Columbine happened, that’s an anomaly. ’ Well, in 2004 we had a new all time record — 48 dead in the schools from violence. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let’s assign some grades. Put your teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An ‘A,’ right? Reluctantly, reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an ‘A,’ right? Danged firefighters, they sleep ‘till they’re hungry and eat ‘till they’re tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence? Come on, what’s our grade? Needs improvement, right?”
Grossman went on, “Why can’t we be like little Johnny Firefighter?” Grossman asked as he prowled the stage. “He’s our A+ student!”
He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall like thunder, “Denial, denial, denial!”
Grossman commanded, “Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They’re hard to spot — they’re painted black — but they’re there. While you’re looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You know that that stuff was selected because it’s fire-retardant. Hooah? Now look over there above the door — you see that fire exit sign? That’s not just any fire exit sign — that’s a ‘battery-backup-when-the-world-ends-it-will-still-be-lit’ fire exit sign. Hooah?”
Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall, Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed, “Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they’re what?! Fireproof or fire retardant, hooah? There is not one stinking thing in this room that will burn!”
Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, “But you’ve still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!
“But you try to prepare for violence — the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill our kids in schools — and people think you’re paranoid. They think you’re crazy. ...They’re in denial.”
Teaching the Teachers
The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers, although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public, must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what they can do in the event of an attack.
“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.
"But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”
Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.
Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, “If somebody had spent five minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have been saved at Columbine?”
Arming Campus Cops is Elementary
Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article called Arming campus cops is elementary . Not surprisingly, Grossman agrees with that hypothesis.
“Never call an unarmed man ‘security’,” Grossman said.
“Call him ‘run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up’ but never call an unarmed man security.
"Imagine if someone said, ‘ I want a trained fire professional on site. I want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge, the uniform — that will keep us safe — but we have no need for fire extinguishers. ’ Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane, delusional, legally liable, to say, ‘ I want a trained security professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform, and I want a security badge, but I don’t want a gun. ’ It’s not the hat, the uniform, or the badge. It’s the tools in the hands of a trained professional that keeps us safe.
“Our problem is not money,” said Grossman. “It is denial.”
Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or next-to-nothing.
Grossman’s Five D’s
Let’s contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman’s “Five D’s.” While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.
1. Denial — Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said Grossman.
2. Deter — Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school drops to almost zero
3. Detect — We’re talking about plain old fashioned police work here. The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn’t happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is paramount.
4. Delay — Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.
a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry. Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target.
b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with) the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what it looks like when you do your response.
5. Destroy — Police officers and agencies should consider the following:
a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire extinguisher in his trunk that he’s crazy or paranoid.
b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police, upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, “If an active killer strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per second.”
c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the function.
d. Have a “go-to-war bag” filled with lots of loaded magazines and supplies for tactical combat casualty care.
e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast guard rotors.
f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300 pounds per square inch.
g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93 . Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.
Coming Soon: External Threats
Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered children in their own religion — they have killed wantonly, mercilessly, and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you think they’d think of killing our kids?
“Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know what they’re going to do next? No! But one thing they’ve done in every country they’ve messed with is killing kids in schools,” Grossman said.
The latest al Qaeda charter states that “children are noble targets” and Osama bin Laden himself has said that “Russia is a preview for what we will do to America.”
What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 — the very day on which children across that country merrily make their return to school after the long summer break — radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more than half of whom were children.
“If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help them understand the terrorist’s plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they’re planning to do to the United States,” he said.
Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in America. It would require almost every enlisted person and every officer in the entire United States Army to put just one armed guard on every school bus in the country.
As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that today.
Hooah, Colonel!
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If you think the problem is guns, you're in denial.
Guns are not the issue. Id like to see a study to see how taking prayer out of school and the 10 commandments correlates with any kind of increase in school violence.
Well, as usual, here on NT we have plenty of people in denial. Calling for the banning of a weapon. In other words, deny that evil exist in Man, and project that evil on an object. Banning a weapon will not stop evil.
Agreed. However, banning the kind of weapons that allow an evil person to take so many lives at once is not irrational. That seems to be the purpose of most of the shooters. Not just to kill an intended victim, but, to take as many lives as they possibly can in as little time as they think they have.
Having said that.......banning such weapons will also make those on the black market richer, as there are always going to be those who are willing to sell their own souls to the Devil in favor of the almighty dollar. If it ain't them on the receiving end they don't care. However, it may reduce the number of such weapons being sold because most Americans are not going to buy from the black market. And if they are caught with the banned weapon, they have a lot to lose.
Just my own thoughts.
Yes, it is. In EVERY mass/spree killing in the past few years, those years where everyone has gnashed their teeth about it, it has been learned that OTHER factors, OTHER laws were and are in place that should have stopped them. And they failed. And a ban of these weapons did nothing to stop Columbine.
NO where in the article does this guy talk about banning weapons. No where does the officer who authored the article mention banning weapons. Because they both are smart enough to know that banning the weapon denies the real threat: evil men with evil intentions.
We've tried it. It didn't work then. It wont work now. Because it's not addressing the REAL issue.
I am not denying that there are not other factors that need attention, such as the mental state of the person using the weapon. The reason for banning those type of weapons is because of the high loss of life and wounded they are able to exact with such weapons.
The state of mind is one thing, and indeed needs to be addressed, but, the ability to obtain the type of weapon that can cause such a high number of deaths and injuries in seconds is another. And that needs to be addressed as well.
And that ability should be denied to those who would do evil. I'm in agreement there. But that doesn't mean a complete ban. Again, we tried that. Columbine.
And how is that to be determined by the gun dealer at the time of the sale? If they do a background check and find no incriminating information, how would they know the mental state of the person standing in front of them at the point of sale?
Do we expect gun dealers to be psychologists as well? With some of the shooters there has been no knowledge of of their mental state at the time they purchased their weapons. And many around them were not aware of their mental state as well. Does every one need to take a course in psychology to be able to determine if a person in their presence is a mental case or not?
And how then do we prevent them from purchasing a weapon record of their mental illness? Is there a database that the gun dealers can have access to that lists all those who are mentally ill so as not to sell them a weapon? And even if there is, if the person's name is not on the list, how are the gun dealers supposed to know they are a mental case intending to shoot up a bunch of people?
I really isn't as easy as it sounds.
Not sure how that would work. It might work for adults, but, I doubt that it would be allowed for minors. And some of the shooters have been minors. And the only way that might be allowed at all, is if the Doctor treating them reported them to the authorities. And how that would work against the Doctor/Patient privacy part of it is another question.
It might not be an easy thing to resolve.
Actually Raven, Bruce is right; it is irrational. In order to accomplish the goal you've set, you would need to ignore such cosmetic features as bayonet lugs and hand grips and ban every semi automatic firearm in existence. Also, since there are plenty of non gas operated weapons with large magazine capacity available, they would have to go too. Oops, there goes all lever and pump action weapons and probably most revolvers. Once that is done, and the precedent established, some dirtbag is going to try a sniper attack on a playground. Uh oh, there go all of the bolt action "sniper rifles" Pretty soon, nothing is left. All firearms are banned, which is exactly what the agenda of the left wing calls for. This is called incrementalisn and will not be tolerated. The way to keep it from happening is to stop it cold right at the beginning. The worst part about it is that it doesn't work. You can't stop people from killing large numbers of children by banning the instruments they use, you must harden the targets so that the killers can't get to the kids.
Raven, if they are minors (defined as being under 18), Federal law already does not allow them to buy firearms of any kind.
Bruce,
The ideas of this man and those presented in your article about the hardening of Federal Buildings are excellent and well presented. Unfortunately, they aren't practical. There are, at most, 4-5 hundred Federal Buildings throughout the country. Think about what it cost to harden each one. Now, factor in the fact that there are over 200,000 schools throughout the country and you start to get some idea of the cost. Add in the fact that the Federal Government can't even find the funding to build a simple border wall (even though a wall is a stupid idea, to secure a border, you need razor wire and land mines, backed up by machine gun posts). With that said, hardening schools to some extent (mostly using the principles given by the authors of the article) is a good idea; even though we can't afford to harden them to the level of a fortress like the Federal Buildings are.
Not sure about how that would work with the HIPPA laws, but, do agree on the part about the Doctors. Often Doctors recognize violent tendencies when parents or those close to the patient are unaware of them. I think that is why some parents are surprised when their child does something violent and they say, "We never knew".
And those at the schools can often see a pattern of behavior that can alert them to a student needing counseling and should alert the parents to the fact, or at least, some authority to help the student get the attention they need. Often parents are reluctant to admit their child needs counseling and don't take them to a Doctor for evaluation. Others, simply can't afford it. And that is another issue as well.
There really is no easy fast track solution at this point as I see it. Even if the HIPPA laws are changed, if the person's behavior is not recognized and they are not seeing a Doctor, how would anyone know?
Gun sales have never been the problem. Most of the guns used in these shootings were not purchased by the person who used them, and many times were obtained through theft in the first place. The only sane way of stopping these criminals is to use deterrence by letting them know beforehand that their target is not the soft target provided by the "gun-free zones" but are hard targets that are essentially armed camps by allowing guns to be in those areas.
My county is always trying to add a 1/2 percent tax to sales for one thing or another. Some pass, some fail. Dulay had opined in my other article about adding a tax to gun sales and ammo sales to pay for such improvements. We can do it. We tax gas to repair the roads. Let's tax ammo to harden our schools.
How does that apply to schools? I don't understand the correlation between armed camps and schools.
I agree, not saying they are not able to be changed. But, how does changing them provide for information on those who are not reported? I am not trying to be irrational or argumentative, I am simply trying to wrap my head around how it would work to provide the information necessary to aid gun dealers or others in identifying who the people they need to beware of who may come to their store or place of business. Gun shows are another source of gun purchases. A database would only be beneficial if it was kept up to date, so that any new names would quickly be available. But, if someone with a mental condition was not reported, how would that help them? I truly am interested in hearing yours and other's thoughts on this.
Yes it is irrational. Making a yet another law or enacting a ban is just a "feel-good" measure. No one knows who has these type of weapons or where they are located. Very few, if any, responsible law abiding gun owners would likely turn theirs in. And it would do nothing for the confiscation of the thousands of these kind of weapons in the hands of all kinds and types of bad guys. If a killer can't legally buy a gun, he will resort to finding one on the street. Having armed and trained security in these building would a great first step, because the threat ain't going away.
Denial. Denying that evil is there. It's a shame we have to have active shooter drills. But that's the world we live in. We also have fire drills. And they work. 0 kids killed by school fires.
When I was a kid in school we had air raid drills due to the threat of a possible atom bomb attack. Then there was the threat of a missile attack. Luckily, we never had either one.
Today, air raid type sirens are used in many places to warn of imminent tornado or other types of disasters. Every time I hear one I still stop and look for a place to shelter. It was ingrained in us for years.
Yep. I absorbed much the same regarding the General Quarters (Battle Stations) alarm used on Naval vessels. After being out of the service for over 20 years, I fell asleep in a recliner with the movie In Harm's Way just coming on. Early in the movie, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, the General Quarters alarm was set off. From a sound sleep, I found myself on my feet looking around for my gun station. You never really forget the important stuff.
Yeah......there are some things that we just never forget, nor what they are related to. When I lived in a small town in No Virginia, where there was always a threat of tornadoes during the summer, they sounded the siren every Saturday at different times of the day. The first time I heard it I dove under my large desk and waited to see what came next. After about an hour and nothing happened I went outside and looked around the sky. It was a bright sunny day with no clouds. Then I found out about the tests on Saturdays. But, every time I heard them it really unnerved me, and my first impulse was to dive under my desk by reflex.
We get the same thing Raven, in a small town in Southern Michigan. Back in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, people usually didn't have watches and the clocks in their homes were not that accurate. So, since fire stations were usually close to railroad stations, which had access to time checks whenever needed, the fire siren would be set off every day at noon. This provided a time check for people to set their clocks and told the farm hands that it was time to come in for lunch. When the Weather Bureau started tracking and warning about approaching tornadoes, the siren also began to be used for that. Now, the siren only goes off at noon on Saturdays around here. If it goes off at any other time (happened two times in the 30 years I've lived here) you know it is for a tornado. The sirens also used to be used to summon the volunteer fire department in case of a fire. Now, all of the volunteers have police band radio scanners and can get the call from Central Dispatch.
The time check idea was a good one. When the wind up clocks we to have when I was young started to lose time, we had to call the time on the phone to make sure we had the right time. It used to be free at time. But, it really did come in handy.
If I had said that, or if I published an article from Pamela Geller of Gatestone Institute that said that, I'd be castigated for being an Islamophobe, a racist, or whatever. But being critical of what they have said, the "canary in the coalmine" warning implicit in what they said, is just what this article is warning about: DENIAL!!!