In this story, ABC News seems to be telling us that the best
action in an active shooter situation is to dial 911 and play dead. They run an experiment designed to show us
the ineffectiveness of armed citizens, and that it’s best to wait for
professionals. There are several
problems with their story, and I hope the police instructors participating in
the study were edited in such a manner as to look supportive of ABC’s
opinion. If not, they should be ashamed
of themselves.
ABC took some college students, ran them through a class
taught by police instructors with Simmunition guns and trained them with more
hands-on work than most states’ CHL requirements. Each student is placed in a classroom while
armed with their Simmunition Glock and surprised when an active shooter barges
in the classroom and shoots the place up.
ABC is quick to jump on them for failures and mistakes while ignoring
their own.
First, the bad guys in the study are trained police instructors. They are inoculated against the stressors in
the simulation and do not act as all shooters would in the same situation. The students are in a classroom and it takes
them a while to understand that they are in a simulated shooting. I believe they would respond sooner in an
actual shooting. People take more risks
with training gear. They push their luck
because they want to learn limits that will save their lives later. The bad guys in the study did something in
the video that I believe is a real possibility in the real world: When the test subjects returned fire, they
stopped shooting random people and fixated on the person returning fire. This will save lives.
Also, think of how many shooters have been arrested after
the shooting. It turns out that some of
them don’t want to be shot. This would
cause them to take cover or engage anyone firing at them. Lives would be spared because anyone else
could flee.
ABC makes a huge statement about tunnel vision and how it
causes a person to fixate on a target while ignoring innocent bystanders. I’d like to note that none of the students
shot a bystander. They hit the bad guy,
the floor and a wall. ABC cites two shootings
by citizens to support their stance. In
the first, a man shot his wife in their home.
It seems that he thought she was an intruder. I see absolutely no correlation to the topic
at hand. That is poor judgment and
failure to identify the target. It’s not
tunnel vision during a mass murder. In
the second, a clerk defends against an armed intruder and fires past a woman
holding a small child. They make a point
that he fired inches away from the child, but again I see no relation to the
topic at hand. He didn’t hit the kid and
he made the bad man go away.
ABC wants us to play dead, call 911 and wait for the
professionals. This point is followed up
by how even the professionals screw up shootings by hitting the wrong
people. They also make every mistake
just as the study subjects did, and for the reasons they did. They are humans and training degrades if not repeated. Modern police are trained in responding to
active shooters, but the shooting is usually over before they arrive.
I don’t find this study to be good science. It seems to be politically motivated and not
based on reality. There are few active
shooters stopped by armed citizens because a mass murderer chooses the crime
scene based on probability of success.
They seek kill zones where the cops are far away and there is a confined
mass of unarmed people to slaughter.
In mass shooting, time equals human life. The maximum number of barrels on the bad guy
means less time and more people survive.
Opinions on firearm ownership are like politics and religion. They are not based on fact, they are cultural. This is a clear case of bias to align with
one’s belief while ignoring reality.
There is no replacement for good training, and the vast majority of
armed citizens have very little. Many
police don’t have enough and they probably won’t be there before the shooting
is over anyway.
The cultural fear of firearms produces kill zones where mass
murderers do their work. Teaching
citizens to disarm, play dead and call 911 increases a murder’s success. Firearms are a part of the American culture
that will never go away. They were here
when the U.S. formed and can never be completely eliminated. Mass murdering active shooters are an evil
that the government cannot protect us from.
They will get their weapons no matter what laws are on the books, and
they will kill as many innocent people as possible. I am thankful to be surrounded by the people
in my survey who choose to stand against murderers and those who seek to
improve their success.
