How to Survive an Active Shooter

 

Imagine you are in a terrible situation, and the next 5 minutes will determine your fate. If you aren’t tired with life, you will surely find a way to save your life, right? It’s the same thing with being trapped in a building with an active shooter. Studies show that it takes the police an average of 5 minutes to arrive any crime scene. That’s about how long it will take for your fate to be decided if a crazy active shooter invades your home, school, office, or any other building you find yourself.

However, you don’t have to panic about this. There are certain steps you can take to prevent yourself from getting hurt (or at most, from dying). They teach this a lot in self defense schools, but the masses seldom know about these safety tips. This is the major reason why over 40,000 people died in 2017 from the bullets of active shooters. That’s not all, in 2018 – just recently – about 113 school children were killed by active shooters. These aren’t statistics from the East, these things happened in America. It therefore goes without saying that there is a grave need for people to upgrade their self defense skills. The old duck-and-cover system simply doesn’t work anymore.

Thankfully, a twitter user, “V”, took on to twitter to share some of the active shooter lessons she learnt from work. She started the thread like this:
“I received active shooter training at work today that I feel will save my life in the unfortunate (and likely) event that someone will open fire in public so I’m gonna share my takeaways. Some stuff is obvious, the rest might not be,” The thread went on to become very popular, and obviously, helpful but some persons had a problem with the “likely” she used in her opening paragraph. V took her time to explain the reasons behind her choice of the word. Leveraging upon the recent active shooter statistics, including the unbelievable number of victims in recent times, V was able to convince the followers of the thread that their chances of being in an active shooter situation was high. That being said, she proceeded to sharing the key points she’d learnt from her active shooter training. She called them the “ABC’S to remember in an active shooter scenario”. They are:
A- Avoid
B- Barricade
C- Counter
S- Survive

Most of the points seem like common sense that everybody should know without being told, but, it’s hard to try to focus and think properly when in a panic situation, however, knowing what to do before that time comes, will help you swing into action almost subconsciously. The first point – Avoid – literally means to exit the scene (if you can, and) as soon as possible. But if you are in a situation where escape isn’t possible, look for a way to create a barricade. On this second point, V stressed that people shouldn’t hide under chairs and tables, because those are the places active shooters would expect you to be. She noted that, if possible, the individual should sneak up on the wall behind the door – and shut the door, barricading it with any available tool. If it happens that the barricade didn’t work out as planned, you will have to brace up yourself to attack the enemy. If you are not a fighter, that’s okay, you still have hope. You can do silly things like throwing papers at the shooter. Here, you are at an advantage because, one, you are not where the shooter is expecting you to be, and two, the room is dark, but you know where the shooter is (assuming you already switched off the lights – which you should). If you are a fighter, cool. Use your advantage of sight to attack the shooter. Most shooters use short guns because they are easy to conceal. Go for the barrel of the gun. If you are wise, move it’s barrel away from you. The shooter may shoot, but this would be to your advantage, because, with what you did, the gun would have to be fixed before he (or she) can shoot again. Use this time to hit your attacker badly. Active shooters are likely to have second weapons, so you have to be both fast and efficient. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t go for the muzzle of the gun, because…you will get shot. Lastly, survive. If in any case, the attacker wounds you, do not stay there and pity yourself or say your last prayers, try to escape, because being shot is sometimes a far cry from dying.