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Antoinette Tuff, an accidental hostage negotiator, used her experiences with challenging life issues to successfully convince an armed gunman, who entered the Ronal E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, to give her his AK-47. This is the only school active shooter situation in the US that ended without death or injury to students, faculty, parents, or the shooter himself. Experience hostage negotiators, law enforcement, and community leaders praised her intuitive yet textbook hostage negotiations on August 20, 2013.
The OODA Loop

OBSERVE

ORIENT

DECIDE

ACT
What is happening around you?
Describe your observations in the context of how they occur.
For situational awareness, be at “relaxed alert.” Use all your senses to take in your surroundings. If you are nervous or stressed, you are more likely to have a narrow focus and miss something. Or you may draw attention to yourself. Practice your observation skills and memorizing information like license plate.
Connect yourself to the world as it really is.
Learn from your past mistakes.
First, establish a baseline for what would be normal in a given situation, then watch for anything that deviates from that baseline. Watch for people who are acting overly dominant, either more or less comfortable than others, or more or less interested in the surroundings.
Use what you have observed to make a plan of action. Seconds matter, so having a plan before the threat manifests. Consider your position in the room relative to where the threat might come from. Have an exit strategy and look for items that might be useful barricades or weapons.
This is a difference in deciding and acting.
Act quickly and decisively. Be deliberate.
Whatever action you decide is best, take it quickly and with determination. It can be as simple as crossing the street to avoid passing a dark alley or as crucial as running from an active shooting situation. You may only have seconds to save you life or avoid other harm.
You now have the framework to make an informed choice.
using what you have observed and the plans you develop, decide on the best course of action. In an active threat, consider the principles of run, hide, fight as covered on the next page. This decision must be make quickly, so the more you practice SA, the better equipped you will be.

Training Improves Reaction Time
The average police response time to an active shooting is 3-5 minutes. We have to engage in Run/Hide/Fight concepts until the police are able to arrive and engage the attacker.

Anxiety
Recall
Prepared
Ready to Act
Confusion
Disbelief
Denial
Helplessness
The Importance of Taking Action
Elevated Heartrate
As our heartrate increases,

60 BPM

90 BPM

120 BPM

150 BPM

175 BPM

Denial is often a first reaction to an emergency or crisis. The mind looks for alternative, non-threatening explanations for an otherwise scary or concerning event.

Deliberation is where a person becomes lost in thought, deciding if what they saw or heard is truly an emergency. Without a plan of action, the mind debates various options without taking action.

The goal of training is to move more quickly past denial and through our mind’s deliberation phase to act decisively to keep ourselves and others safe.
This graphic and disturbing video from the Las Vegas concert shooting shows people in the crowd under fire. The video demonstrates the problem with deliberation and why having a plan of action is so important when faced with this kind of event.
Barricades
A barricade should create a significant structural time delay to stop someone from entering the room. Use everyone at your disposal to ensure the best possible time delay.









Locking doors is one of the most effective ways to deny entry to the attacker, as they are often looking for the easiest path to acquire targets.

Covering windows helps reduce the attacker’s ability to acquire a target. This should be a quick, one-step/one-pull process. A person under attack will struggle to recall too many tasks and won’t have the fine motor skills to operate complicated window shades.

Turning lights off in the room further reduces the attacker’s ability to see where their targets are hiding and makes it more challenging to be accurate when acquiring a target.

Keeping your dominant hand free allows you to act more quickly when it comes to defending yourself or fighting the attacker. Seconds count when responding to an active assailant.
Cover versus Concealment
Concealment hides us from a potential attacker. This makes it harder for them to aim a weapon at us accurately and gives us an opportunity to run further from the danger. Concealment does not, however, stop bullets or other projectiles. Cover provides us with a barrier that can stop bullets or other projectiles, offering us a wider degree of protection.

Thick concrete provides cover from most weapons.

The wooden slats of this fence provide concealment but would not stop projectiles. The sections with bricks may provide cover if they are wide and thick enough.

The trunk of a large tree can serve as protective cover.

Car doors only provide concealment - no matter what you've seen in movies. For cover, stay behind the engine block.

Wooden doors and frosted glass will not provide cover from projectiles.

A thick earth berm provides cover along with concealment.

Thick bushes and shrubbery provide concealment but not cover.

While wooden doors only provide concealment, steel doors can also provide cover.

Furniture may seem protective but only provides concealment, not cover.

This concept is borrowed from the police and military tactics that stress the importance of not standing in the doorway. which puts the person at a higher risk as they are backlit and more vulnerable in this position. The practical application is to stay outside the line of site that expands from the doorway into a room (the red triangle).

A safer corner is just that, a safer place to hide in a room that is outside of the fatal funnel. These corners should be marked clearly and consistently in every room.
Identifying Safer Corners

While marking the floor with tape is an easy option, it doesn’t stand out as much as we would like. Markings on the floor can be easily covered with desks, chairs, or other portable items such as a rug or wheel-in media cart.

This mascot paw is easily identifiable by students and helps reduce the “scare” factor when it comes to training on these topics by using a familiar, community-facing image that won’t be as scary for younger students.

This is another example of a school using a mascot paw print to identify a safer corner.

The paw print does not stand out among the other items in the classroom. The laminated paw print could easily be knocked to the floor behind the shelving units.

When police respond to an active assailant event, they have clear direction and priorities. This can cause confusion if you see an officer pass by someone who has been wounded. The priority for law enforcement is to 1) stop the killing and then, 2) help those who have been wounded (e.g., stop the dying), and 3) get the wounded to a medical facility.

When being evacuated by law enforcement following an active assailant incident or drill, keep your hands empty. Hold them up with your fingers spread wide. This will reduce misreads by law enforcement related to potential weapons.

Students and other community members being evacuated should be aware that police are likely to have guns drawn. As with anticipating a power outage and loss of light in an earthquake, students should be aware beforehand that police will have weapons in a ready position and may have unfamiliar long rifles and shotguns.

During an evacuation, compliance with law enforcement is critical. While some communities may have a wariness or mistrust of law enforcement, during an active assailant event, complying with commands and avoiding questions, challenges, or arguments is critical for everyone’s safety.

It is likely that students will be searched as part of the evacuation process. Comply with police and recall earlier statements about the nature of adrenaline and the heightened emotional state of law enforcement during this time.

Students, faculty, staff, and employees will experience intense and overwhelming emotions during active assailant events. Helping students and community members understand how the body reacts when under extreme stress will help reduce these emotions and allow for better responses.
Evacuation from the 2024 Georgia school shooting
Interacting with law enforcement during the 2021 Oxford school shooting
Run | Hide | Fight
Remember that run, hide, fight is not a progression. Rather, we use situational awareness to decide what action to take depending on what is going on around us.

Run to an escape route. Leave your belongings behind and keep your hands visible.

Face
Groin
Throat
Control the Weapon

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Mindset Active Assailant Training