FEMA Active Shooter Training

I've just completed the Active Shooter Training for a second time; we're required to do it at least annually.

While a lot of the information covered in the training is not new to me, I thought I'd share the link if anyone is interested in taking the training.  It's a free training and at the end, after you pass the final exam, you get a certificate.

Essentially, employees are being trained to evacuate, hide, and fight, in that order.  While some of us might immediately want to jump right to the third step - fight - it might not be wise.  Our primary role in an active shooter situation is to save our own bacon (and our families' if they are with us).

I still take issue with the hide thing - that's how so many children get killed in classrooms.  I understand (sort of) the logistics of evacuating lots of scared children, but my stomach churns at the thought of locking them in a classroom and awaiting their slaughter.  My belief is that schools do the lock-down thing because they're afraid of getting sued if a child gets lost during an evacuation.  Not lost, as in dead, but lost as in they run away panicked.  I've written about it before - that my children were always instructed to leave the building, to not allow themselves to be locked in a classroom.  It's a lot harder to shoot a child running away from the building than it is to shoot children huddled in a corner.  The one thing that my kids worried about was getting in trouble with the principal.  I was not very politically correct with them, as I told my kids to f*ck the principal, I would deal with him/her after the incident had occurred.  I almost wrote we were "lucky, an incident never occurred while they were in school", but that's not actually luck.  Statistically, our kids are super safe at school.  School shootings garner a lot of headlines, but when you look at the total number of public schools in the US and compare it to the handful of school shootings we've had, luck has nothing to do with it. 

Anygetoffthesoapbox, if we've done a good job with Situational Awareness, evacuation shouldn't be a problem, because we should have already evaluated the escape routes and kept an eye on what is going on around us.  The problems that can arise during evacuation are the two-legged kind.  The people who don't think evil can happen to them and go from Condition White (where they live their whole lives) to Condition Black (freeze or panic in the face of danger) can be our biggest obstacles.

Since I'm kind of preaching to the choir here, I'd like to encourage all of you to share this link with people who aren't of a like mind.  I don't want you to share to change their stance on gun control, and don't expect them to open their eyes to the world around them, but simply to maybe arm them with something they can feel they are in control of.