What’s the best way to survive an active shooter situation?

Let’s remove reason and morality from the equation and imagine YOU are the active shooter.

What do you want? An unrestricted field of fire in a target-rich environment. To be the only one dictating the tempo so you can maintain all of the above.

Like a shark cleaving through a school of fish, you want everyone responding to what you do in such a way as to reinforce your operational dominance. In other words, you want the crowd to surge away from you.

When they run they move into your work area and provide a target better than the broad side of a barn… the backside of a crowd. They clear out space in front of you so you are free to fire at will. And best of all, they leave you alone to do what you came here for, and in spades.

This understanding—as reprehensible as it is to dwell on it—is valuable because it tells us what we really need to do in these situations: we must, as a group, swarm the shooter.

We have to tackle him, weigh him down with numbers, immobilize him with our sheer mass. This is the only way to limit his access to victims, interrupt his ability to operate and strip him of control over the engagement—essentially reversing the roles and forcing him to worry about defending himself from a panicked mob.

If you’re the shooter, you want distance, not people closing, close or right next to you, spoiling your aim, restricting your field of fire, imposing a time-limit on how long you’re operational. If you’re the shooter, you want time and space within which to work.

If you’re in the crowd, you want to restrict, constrict, and eliminate that time and space.

While it looks great on paper, it should be understood that the swarm tactic won’t reduce casualties to zero. But if it’s the difference between three or 13 dead then the cold equations say it’s better that we lose a few instead of many. It certainly can’t be any worse than what we currently have (and experienced once again in Texas)…the herd-tactic of hoping he has so many targets you’ll be the lucky one who’s overlooked.

Swarming an active shooter isn’t an easy thing, compounded by the fear that you’ll be the only one who goes for it. It’s only going to work if you know at least some of the people around you are going to pile in with you, that it’s not just you vs. the shooter, but the entire crowd.

We need to decide, as a society, that we are done allowing the insane to exercise their madness on us freely and without immediate consequence; that we will not be picked off as terrified individuals but will rise as one and end any threat before it can gain traction.