It’s a rare circumstance that real events perfectly enact a belief or outlook, but that’s exactly what happened in two different churches in Texas. In 2017 at the Sutherland Springs Church, Devin Kelley committed a mass killing event that resulted in 26 dead and 20 more wounded. Almost exactly two years later, an attacker stood and opened fire in the West Freeway Church of Christ and was almost immediately neutralized by an armed member of the church security team. There were only two parishioners wounded. That is a large and impossible to ignore difference: in the event where no immediate responder was able to intervene, 46 people were wounded or killed. In the event where an immediate responder was on scene, armed and trained, two people were wounded. Putting the politics of guns and the 2nd Amendment aside, there is no argument that having trained, willing and ready people in any given area where an attack might occur is the fastest way to neutralize the attacker and minimize casualties.
With 27 attacks having occurred in 2018 (per the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Secret Service) that created 213 casualties (85 killed, 128 wounded) one can’t help but consider the potential impact of an immediate responder. If you look at the two attacks cited in the first paragraph, mathematically speaking, the attack with a competent immediate responder resulted in 1/23 of the casualties. That’s a reduction of 96% (roughly). If we could have done that with every attack in 2018, the combined dead / wounded casualty count wouldn’t have been 213; it would have been… nine.
Realistically speaking, having an intervention by an immediate responder doesn’t always reduce the casualty count by such a significant amount. That recognized, the result of immediate responder intervention may only be a reduction of impact and the opportunity for some potential victims to escape.
One example of such would be the attack that occurred at the Crossroads Center Mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota in September 2016. Dahir Adan committed an attack at that mall using two butcher knives as his primary weapons (and there was STILL gun control legislation submitted by politicians based on the attack). Adan managed to injure ten people, three of whom were hospitalized, before he was engaged by an off-duty officer who was nearby and responded to the scene expeditiously. Officer Jason Falconer shot Adan and ended the attack but not before he himself received some serious wounds from the attacker’s knives. The question is: If Officer Falconer hadn’t intervened, how many more people might Adan have attacked, wounded or killed?
Another example is from March of 2005 during an attack occurred on the Red Lake Reservation, also in Minnesota. In a high school the attacker was armed with a handgun but his attack was interrupted by another student – a 16 year old sophomore – who used a pencil as an improvised weapon, stabbing the attacker in the stomach. While the sophomore was shot and injured, and he was unsuccessful at stopping the attacker, while they were fighting it gave opportunity for other students… potential victims… to escape from the area. That deprived the attacker of some of his victim pool and limited or reduced the casualty count from that event.
The bottom line, and point of this article, is that the faster we (all good guys) can engage with and neutralize or even just slow down an attacker, the lower the casualty count from any attack will be. If the true goal of all active shooter response protocols and training is to minimize the loss of life and suffering, then the most obviously impactful protocol would be to empower all sufficiently courageous immediate responders available.
Empowering immediate responders may require legislative protections and it most assuredly will require a coordinated effort at sharing protocol information between the citizen “good guy” potential immediate responders and the local law enforcement entity. In addition to empowering the immediate responders, such an expanded citizen / law enforcement agency relationship would directly benefit community relations, increase the professional image of the agency, and decrease crime (in general) as the law enforcement agency impact grows due to the expanded relationship(s) built.
