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Article: 11-2004
Note: The author was born in New York City and is full professor in the Psychology Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He received his doctorate in 1975 and has written numerous professional articles and books in the areas of visual perception, cognition and statistics. He recently has been studying the influence of weapons type used in defensive gun usages on simulated jury decisions. A convert to the world of defensive firearms, he has been an NTI practitioner & has studied with several well known trainers.
I was asked recently by my campus police department if I
wanted to take part in an Active Shooter training scenario. The department
takes firearms training very seriously and qualifies several times a year. I have shot with them at qualification and
also have served on their search committees for new officers and
promotions. Of course, I jumped at the
chance. I prepared by reading up on
ambush techniques and picking the brains of NTI and Insight list folks.
After Columbine and with the threat of terrorism, we now
know that containment of threat tactics may not always serve. The officers on the spot may have to deal
with, engage and search for an active shooter.
For a campus department to train for such is exemplary.
My focus is on what happened and what did we learn from me
being an active shooter? Here we go:
First Day:
We ran five teams of three officers each into a nest of
what would be offices. Basically the training
officer wanted to practice entry. It
was moi and another officer as the BGs – together or singularly. We had a fully auto paintball gun and a pump
paint ball shotgun. Officers had paint
ball handguns with numbers of rounds corresponding to their duty load. I never used the fully auto option on the
gun. We had sixty rounds. If I were an active shooter, I would have an
AR-15 with 30 round mags so the capacity was in line with reality. I would probably have a Glock of some sort
as a handgun and a smaller hidden BUG.
Thus, I carried an Airsoft backup pistol.
I wore a paint ball vest that simulated body armor. The site was a nest of interconnected
officers with cinder block walls (cover), some teller like windows and internal
passages. Many of our buildings are
like that, with lots of good solid stone or brick cover. We had sound effects of gun shots, fog and
screaming people. The responding
officers had to enter through a doorway.
What we found out is that if we were aggressive on initial
entry we had them. We set up so one
person had them on initial fire and the second would get them in a
crossfire. The first had an initial
covered position or a surprise rush. We eliminated some teams completely. When we pulled back and let them form up, it
was mixed. We got in some rounds, took
some down and then were eliminated ourselves.
In the last on the first day, I was the lone BG.
Discussing this with the training officer, we laid a table across the entry
way, a couple of feet into the room, so it was not immediately seen on
entry. The idea was produce a fatal
funnel. The guys bunched up and I got
two before the third responded with rapid fire that drove me back and I took a
belly shot and a hand shot. I decided I
was down and called it.
All were very positive.
Some of them had not had significant FOF and found it very useful. I was declared a good BG. Some of the guys for the next day were SWAT
certified and vowed revenge.
Day 2:
On the second day we varied off the entry level ambush.
They had enough of that. We did various
hostage surrenders, bystanders to be saved, find a nut (moi) who has given up
but is in a hidey hole crying (but is still with guns) and other things that
they had laid out in the lesson plan.
The last run was an entry for a team (one shift) that had
not made entry against opposition. They
were told that if they were under significant fire and had no reason to enter,
they needed to back off. I was again,
the lone madman but was specifically told to be aggressive by the chief. Entering a nest of offices is
dangerous. However, the heat of the
moment led them to enter. Specifically,
the lead officer was annoyed at me because of previous clashes. That made him rash. Again, I set up an obstacle to delay a rapid
entry and form another fatal funnel. I
shot the first officer and the other two took reasonable cover. They did make a mistake as they forgot a
passage way that I could control as they tried to flank me. I flanked them
instead. Thus they were eliminated.
Things Learned by Me:
Tactically, I was pleased that my training as a civilian
stood me in good stead. Use of angles,
cover, aimed fire, backup guns all came to the fore. Shooting over the top of cover (I had to once) gets you shot in
the head - ouch. I have to thank my
previous FOF experiences with Karl Rehn, OPS, and the NTI for giving me an
inner strength to face the attacks. I
remember my first run at the NTI. I was
sucking air like a bellows and not breathing.
In ATSA village, I was vaporized in the bank robbery. Thus, facing repeated intense attacks from
the entry teams, I knew I could do it.
I remembered to breathe. The stress
inoculation of training is incredibly useful.
Another point from training is to stay in the fight. I switched hands and guns, ignored painful
whacks if it wasn’t in a seemingly lethal area. Aggression counts. I came
away with a sense that even if faced with several armed opponents, in a life or
death struggle, one could prevail or do significant damage to the other
side. My ATSA village experience, esp.
my team’s debacle in the bank, aided me in this.
What Did the Officers Learn?
The level of training varied. Some of them had SWAT
training. Some just had standard LEO
training. I think they took away:
1. Use of cover and avoiding the fatal funnel. The
inability to get to cover caused many of the teams to have very difficult
times. If this year’s NTI participants
recall, we had some discussion of shooting at an opponent’s knee as it was
visible/vulnerable. In one scenario,
the officers were engaging my partner and lo and behold there was a knee and
inner thigh coming around a door. I
remembered my lesson and shot it.
Be prepared to take hits.
In training, have a plan to get those who are seriously hit out of the
fight. Let the teams deal with
causalities and the shock of loss.
2. You really have to identify your targets. I was shot once when I was just a
hostage. We had one officer throw open
a door and just hose a stream of fire down the hall away as he saw
movement. Whistles blew and he was
stopped. He was reminded that this was
a hostage rescue and he had no knowledge of targets and what was behind what he
hit. In fact, he was shooting at
nothing. Neither of us was there.
I think some officers needed clarification on the mission
of FOF training. It’s not a game where
you win by killing the aggressor. A win
is having the best outcome from a law enforcement point of view.
3. Learn to negotiate doorways. Some teams pied really well.
Others did not. That’s why this practice was essential for them. One officer crept up to the door of a room
that I was in. I saw his long gun
muzzle stick way out before I saw his body.
I shot the barrel. In another
instance, it was discovered that I was in a room behind furniture. Perhaps,
verbal contact should have been initiated by the officers from behind
cover? However, one officer decided to
leap across the door way. He would have
been getting a buttocks transplant in real life. I don’t think he appreciate the big pink paintball splashes on
his tush. He was the guy who later
acted rashly.
4. If faced with serious opposition armed with serious
guns, do you withdraw and try to contain?
We had the equivalent of semi-auto long arms; the officers learned
whether it was wise to try to enter or back off and contain the situation. This
is an interesting problem after Columbine.
Either two of us were set up or one of us. We knew what we were doing. The officers heard what sounded like an
active shooter. A couple of teams
actually moved quite well tactically, pinned us and contained us. The best were two women officers.
5. The school has unarmed officers. They do parking tickets and the like. They were run through a scenario once. The
rationale was that they might be with an armed officer who then gets shot. Should they pick up the officer’s gun and
stay in the fight? They needed some gun
basics: the four rules, use your sights, etc.
6. Leave your ego at the door. One rule of the NTI is NO WHINING. Without going into a long story, one officer who was
self-proclaimed as an expert shot and tactician was rudely eliminated as he was
the one who acted rashly. Needless to say, he did not take it well and still
doesn’t several weeks later. There are
reasons for such behavior – lack of personality strength to be able to learn
from one’s mistakes, loss of face and position in a dominance hierarchy or
perhaps realizing that he could be so easily killed left him in existential
crisis. I found being rudely eliminated
at the NTI to be a learning experience but I’m not a self-proclaimed master
tactician. Thanks to some NTI members
for helping me sort this out. I wonder
if training officers should look for such behavior and plan some debriefing.
Better dead in training then being really dead. I certainly learned quite a bit at the NTI
seminar from my screw ups. I got blown
up by a suicide bomber, shot in the fatal funnel and last took a chestful of
Simmunitions from an MP-5 when I stupidly charged out a door.
That hurt. It drew
blood as I just had a tee shirt over my fat belly and chest. However, the NTI
rules were no whining or egos. One of
my team mates caught a Sims round right in his check from that one weird shot
the skirted the edge of his mask.
Didn’t whine.
7. Little things:
a. Flashlight position – The FBI hold didn’t fool me. Bang
b. Being yelled at by police to surrender was
intimidating.
c. Buildings – Do architects consider
how wonderfully they set up ambushes with all those pillars and passageways?
Should they?
To conclude – The experience was very useful to me
personally. I hope it helped the
officers. It does make me worry that
with the current attitudes in most of the country; at best officers will be
playing catch up when such incidents occur. They will put their lives at
risks. In reality, our school can't
defend against an active shooter quick enough to prevent 10's of causalities
unless it is pure luck that the shooter is spotted on the way in. If the BG’s are set and the first responders
only have handguns to contend with folks using semi-auto long guns – the
officers are in for severe difficulty.
It is not hard to read about entry techniques and counter them. First responders will have a terrible time
if there is any competency in their opponents. Without individuals who are
armed, the initial attacks will be killing zones for the BGs. Schools in the USA will never allow armed
teachers for various socio-political and liability issues. If serious attacks were planned against
schools, it would be a bloodbath. We
once had a discussion of the university response to a stalking incident with
someone who potentially could be dangerous.
We were told bluntly that the institution and risk management experts
had calculated that it would be easier to pay off a faculty and family if you
took some action against the school for non-protection than to pay off the
stalker if he or she sued for harassment or an innocent if you accidentally put
a round into such. Most companies have
similar policies because of the potential liabilities. It is a philosophical flaw in modern life
that one must be a victim. I wish that
Presidents, Governors, and legislators of different types might realize that a
first line of defense against such actions starts with the armed citizen. It has been shown to be effective in
shooting incidents here and abroad.
Yes, the one teacher facing a squad is in a difficult situation. Faced with three active shooters, maybe not
or at least you can seriously degrade them. Unfortunately, for some
politicians, having firearms is about hunting with an O/U shotgun. I don’t
expect to fight a team of terrorist skeet or geese anytime soon.