You are absolutely correct that active shooters are stone cold realists and literally laugh at the unicorn security believers who think that a sign will stop someone who has decided to commit capital murder. They see the sign, they look for physical obstacles (secured areas, armed school resource officers, etc.) and consider if they can plan around them. In the Parkland case, Cruz correctly assessed the effectiveness of Broward's school resource officers and recognized they would not present an obstacle.chasfm11 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 11, 2019 8:43 amBoxerrider wrote: ↑Thu Jan 10, 2019 9:01 pm Functional security doesn't require great expense. It does require people to pay attention and act responsibly. Broward County Schools failed at that years before this kid started shooting.
Historically, when many shooters of this type were faced with an armed response, they were killed, immediately surrendered or committed suicide. There isn't time for a large tactical team to respond. I'm not suggesting that every teacher must be armed, and haven't heard anybody who has. I am suggesting that every teacher who is willing and able be armed. You don't want somebody coming to help, you want somebody who is already there to help. Also, yes, armed means loaded and on their person. I can comfortably wear a 1911 and two extra mags under the same dress pants and tucked shirt I wore in the classroom for 18 years.
Tuckable Commander 3.JPGThe first thing is to remove the idea that the person will NOT be confronted in their misdeeds. It is said that putting a sign in front of your house saying that you have an alarm system doesn't work but I've never seen anyone put up a sign saying their house is unprotected.
The real problem with these kinds of events is that the shooters have put a lot of thought into the situation before they act. They have, in my opinion, considered the reality of the situation more than the air-headed serendipity minded people who think that not even entertaining the possibility of a tragedy will make it not happen. A previous post talked about a multi-layered approach. In my conversations about arming teachers in our local district (and getting tremendous push back from teachers, school officials, police chiefs and parents) I've come to believe that a level of planning like that will never occur. The opponents can simply will the bad situation away. I think that is exactly what happened at Parkland. Even while the tragedy was unfolding, they were still trying to will it away, as they had previously done with Cruz.
Professional risk managers understand the concepts of risk tolerance (how much damage to assets an organization is willing to accept or that cannot be avoided) and adversary task and response timelines. A rational organization deliberately defines its risk tolerance and designs its security plans in a way that ensures early responder notification and an adversary task timeline (from the time an attack starts to the time the damage to assets exceeds the risk tolerance) is longer than the response timeline (the time from start of the attack until effective termination of attacker action). Reversal of that ratio is the definition of an ineffective plan. This type of analysis pertains to anything worth protecting, whether it be lives, gun collections, jewelry, or anything else.
Poorly run organizations fail to consciously define their risk tolerance or evaluate the timelines built into their plans. This results in a risk tolerance that is not consciously defined and is often unrecognized. For example, a school that depends on external agency response to stop an active shooter is effectively accepting a risk tolerance of 20 - 45 casualties (2 -3 per minute on average during the average 15 minutes or so it takes until the shooter is stopped.) Pointing this out often results in stunned silence and queasy stomachs among those responsible for such a plan.
Properly trained armed teachers scattered throughout a school present a far better response timeline that is much more likely to keep casualties (some of which will have already occurred before an armed teacher recognizes an attack is underway) much closer to the low single digits. Signage that announces this provision without disclosing who, how many, or where is an extremely strong deterrent that is very likely to stop most attacks before they start because the attacker, even a suicidal one, can't be assured of the ten minutes of unopposed domination he needs to carry out a mass attack.
This is the thought process behind rational security planning. It remains a mystery to those who, as Mark Twain once said, have allowed their schooling to interfere with their education.