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Vital Intel! How to Survive a Mass Shooting
19 Sep 15
Joe Biggs talks with a firearms training expert about how you can keep yourself and others alive in the event of a shooting and the sort of training that you’ll need.
And another article to add to it:
As a kid, fire drills taught you fire safety. And you haven’t been killed by a fire. Your parents trained similarly for nuclear war. With 248 mass shootings in US in the 238 days of 2015, it’s time we began treating those the same way. This is how.
That statistic is drawn from ShootingTracker.com, a community-sourced tracking tool. “The old FBI definition of Mass Murder (not even the most recent one) is four or more people murdered in one event,” the site’s creatorsexplain of what makes it different from law enforcement-sourced numbers. “It is only logical that a Mass Shooting is four or more people shot in one event.”
This is not just another article meant to scare you. I write about adventure travel in the outdoors and, through that, I live a life of managed risk. I’ve rescued myself and saved the lives of others. I’m able to do all that because I try to learn everything I can about the risks I face, learn how to overcome them, and then approach any potentially dangerous situation prepared for it both mentally and physically. And that’s why I’m writing this article. Like any reasonable person, the prospect of being caught up in a mass shooting terrifies me. It’s not how I want to go out, personally, and I’d also like to find substantial advice to give to my loved ones.
This article isn’t going to focus on shooting back or the politics around guns. Most people don’t carry them every day, and that’s who this article is for: most people. Neither will we consider the implications of why these shootings occur; instead we’ll simply focus on what you and I can do to survive them. This is a practical guide, not an attempt to cover the mass shooting topic comprehensively.
To compile it, I conducted my own research, then interviewed an expert in the field. Chris — we’ll leave the last name off — is a former Marine, former SWAT team member and is now a specialist in “Active Shooter” events. He traveled to and studied the shootings at, “Columbine, Virginia Tech, Ft. Hood and about 20 others.” His expertise will be woven in, throughout the article.
“Prevention is the best cure,” goes the old saying. Prompted by Columbine and other high profile school shootings, the Secret Service and Department of Education embarked on a collaborative study of “targeted violence” in schoolsback in the late ‘90s. Examining 37 incidents spanning 1974 to 2000, the study made the following conclusions:
While each of these findings is important and may be useful in detecting and preventing future attacks, the final two findings in particular highlight further areas of inquiry. First, the perpetrators exhibited concerning behavior prior to the attack in 93% of the incidents. This suggests that attacks might have been avoided with proper observation techniques and more open sharing of information. Second, and more significant, at least one other person had some type of knowledge of the attacker’s plan in 81% of the incidents and more than one person had such knowledge in 59% of the incidents. Of those individuals who had prior knowledge, 93% were peers of the perpetrators – friends, schoolmates, or siblings.
#prepper #survival #shooting #survive