Once again, our nation has been shocked and saddened by a tragic mass casualty shooting. Over the course of the past year, more than a dozen members of our authoring team from the United States and the United Kingdom been conducting a massive amount of research on these types of attacks for a lengthy page university textbook Extreme Violence – Preventing and Preparing for Active Shooter, Active Killer, Terrorism and Hate Crimes. This research verifies that America and most other countries have experienced periodic active shooter attacks. In fact, American school attacks date back to the first active shooter incident in a Catholic school in Newburgh, New York in 1891. Our research team has found active shooter events in dozens of countries including Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Scotland, England, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, Germany, India, Vietnam, Brazil, China, the Philippines, France and Norway to mention only a few.
While active shooter incidents have been a part of the American landscape for more than a century, this week’s unusually deadly attack indicates an increased risk level for densely crowded open-air events like football games and elementary school festivals. While there have been several sniper attacks involving American schools in the past few decades, most of these have not received widespread media coverage. The shooting of a middle school student by the Beltway snipers is a notable exception. Many of the averted and successfully executed planned attacks I have worked have involved pre-attack research by the aggressors. We also know that previous attackers have been focused on setting new records for shooting victims. Two of the most prominent examples of this in recent times is the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Utoya Island Norway attackers. The Sandy Hook attacker assembled a database of more than 500 attacks from around the world and planned extensively in an effort to kill more victims that the killer from Norway. When combined with the tendency for attackers to copy specific and successful attack methods, the deadly toll of the Las Vegas attack is cause for concern.
As I have stated for many years, there are no measures that can help the United States or any country eliminate the threat of active shooter events. As this week’s attack demonstrated, simplistic approaches such as Run, Hide, Fight can be rendered ineffective by simple variance in attack method. In fact, as more than 100 years of fire science research documents that people in large groups move to safety slower when they attempt to run, many current active shooter training approaches can increase the opportunity for active shooters to kill more victims by causing delays in evacuation in some specific scenarios. There are, however, a number of strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing the risk they pose. While there no absolutes in active shooter prevention and preparedness, there are excellent possibilities and probabilities which are worth the time, energy and fiscal commitment needed to implement them.