Active Shooter Training: What It Is and Why It's Needed (Episode 6)

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Darcy Grabenstein: Hello from SmartLinx Solutions. In today's podcast, we'll talk about active shooter training, a topic that, unfortunately, is a reality in our society. Our guest is Lieutenant Joseph A. Hendry Jr., a national trainer with the ALICE Training Institute. ALICE is an acronym for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate. Retiring after a distinguished 27-year career with the Kent State Ohio Police Department, Lieutenant Hendry has been named by the Ohio Department of Homeland Security and the Ohio Attorney General's Office as an expert in civilian and law enforcement response to active threats. He's been trained a crisis intervention team officer in dealing with mental health issues, he served six years in the U.S. Marine Core, and he was an intelligent liaison officer with Ohio Homeland Security. I'm going to keep it informal and call you Joe instead of Lieutenant Hendry. Joe, how did you get involved in active shooter training?

Lt. Joe Hendry: Oh geez, Darcy. Probably in the late 1990s, I was on SWAT then. The Columbine incident actually happened. Right after that, tactics for law enforcement changed in the United States from a SWAT team response to small-unit tactics. I was on a SWAT team when that happened, and we started training obviously more in-depth for it than we had been before. I became an instructor in small-unit tactics, which is the formation of the first three or four road police officers that get to the scene, and go in and deal with an active shooter, active threat, a bomb, a critical accident, however you want to refer to it, inside the building. That was really the very first time where I became immersed in the subject.

DG: Wow, I've got to ask you nationwide, have you seen an increase in this type of training and was there an incident that prompted this interest?

JH: Yes, I think Columbine started down that path. Virginia Tech obviously sped up what was going on in the country. Law enforcement kept evolving tactics. We went from SWAT tactics to team tactics after Columbine to solo engagement tactics after Virginia Tech. Now, based on the incident in San Bernardino about two years ago, actually, we've started doing tactics that involve team tactics, bounding overwatch, which was a military tactic at one time, but now it is a law enforcement tactic. We've changed our response several times in the law enforcement things to try to get faster and respond better.

The civilian end of things, obviously, people really weren't doing anything. I graduated from high school in 1985. There was no lockdown training for active shooter then. It became being used in the early 1990s extensively. That lockdown training that people were getting was actually based on drive-by shooting training from southern California, so it had absolutely nothing to do with an active shooter. It was for a threat that was outside of your building to try and protect people inside it. People tried to use that tactic internally. It failed in places like Columbine, Red Lake, Minnesota, Virginia Tech, and failed again at Sandy Hook. About five years ago, there was a major sea change in how people were viewing this event and how civilians should be responding.

DG: That may be, but Joe, do you think this type of training is usually accepted or have you in your experience encountered resistance to the concept?

JH: ALICE Training is not new. It's been around for ― next year it will be 17 years. It was developed right after Columbine. When I first started doing this, I worked obviously at a university. We started doing the training in 2009 based on the experiences at Virginia Tech, and studying data event about how does one guy shoot 47 people, one at a time, who are all adults in classrooms? When we looked at our response at the university, we decided it was inadequate. We had a lockdown plan on paper. Obviously, Virginia Tech showed us that that plan was unworkable, that there was no response other than people to sit on the floor, not move, and be quiet, while most of them were being shot from just a couple of feet away. We went out and we studied every program in the country that existed. We decided on ALICE Training. It really changed us then back in 2009. I think the failure of the concept of lockdown at Sandy Hook is what exacerbated everything recently. Obviously, Sandy Hook had a perfect lockdown drill the week before they had their event. Then when they actually had to use the response, it collapsed on them.

DG: I know you've mentioned Sandy Hook a few times. I know that you conduct training for all types of facilities such as schools, businesses, government facilities, houses of worship, and healthcare organizations. How would you say training for healthcare such as a long-term care facility differs from other types of organizations? That is, in an LTC facility, you have residents who aren't ambulatory or who may have dementia. How does that come into play in your training?

JH: Number one, the very first thing we have to look at for a facility before we actually even do training is to conduct a physical security assessment of that facility to see what the physical layout of the facility is, to see if it actually is able. That's one of the pieces that's been missing a lot of the times. People were doing lockdown and not even understanding how it worked in conjunction with their infrastructure. One of the things we want to look at is how does the infrastructure in those facilities actually hinder or help the response. We do a lot of training. In fact, the entire month I've been in a hospital system doing some assessment and getting ready to do training in it. Some of the things in medical facilities, in hospitals, work heavily in your favor because of the dementia patients and things like that that are inside facilities. Those areas usually have high-security doors with heavy pulls on the doors, electromagnetic locks, things like that. Those actually could help in an incident keep a threat out.

The interesting thing is we have to train the staff potentially how to move patients to more secured areas from unsecured areas. There have been shootings obviously in nursing homes where patients have been killed in hallways and wheelchairs, in their beds in their rooms. It's to get the staff to realize how to protect those people. How to move them into more secured areas very similar to the way they do for a fire because, obviously, they don't evacuate the facility in many instances for a fire. Those areas that sometimes are used in preventing fire from getting to people are also useful for in getting a threat not to be able to get to those people. Really, how those people respond in conjunction with their infrastructure makes a huge difference in the mitigation of casualties during an event.

DG: Sure, that makes sense. I've got to ask, what about a long-term care facility that also may have a religious component? To me, that's almost a double whammy. Would there be additional elements incorporated into the training or would it be similar to any other facility?

JH: It would be very similar to any other facility. I always tell this: “People are people no matter where you go.” Human beings, as far as responding to violence, basically, have three major responses that we do. The number one thing we do is obviously we evacuate from violence. If you do anything with fire training or stranger danger training, or rape awareness defense, all of those are based on getting away from the threat. This is no different.

Now, in long-term care facilities and with mental health patients, things like that, evacuation in some of those facilities isn't an option. Those people aren't able to evacuate. They're unable even to assist in keeping themselves safe, so that requires additional training. Having a religious component do it really other than when I go in and do training, being aware of the religious component as not to offend anybody in anything. Most people get it. I've taught in everything from Native American tribe facilities to Catholic facilities, Jewish facilities. I've had people that follow Islam in class. It's really the same response from everyone as far as you go as a human being. The religious component doesn't really come into play when someone's attempting to kill you.

DG: That obviously makes sense to me. Joe, I think a lot of people will be wondering how much time and effort are involved in a training? In our conversations, you've said it's more than just having a plan on paper. It's more than just one and done. What is involved?

JH: Yeah, we see a lot of training nationally where someone comes in and gives a lecture for an hour and they leave. They leave you a PowerPoint, or emergency operation plan, and you're done. That's not training, that's presentation. Training actually involves doing things. Training, when we implement ALICE and it's done correctly, involves like five separate different steps. It's getting approval. It's getting everything set up. It's doing the physical assessment of your facility. It's actually setting up the training. Doing emergency operation plans, tabletop exercises. That's all done before you actually get to “We're going to run a drill.” A lot of people skip steps. They don't do things adequately.

One of the things with the institute is we're actually the only company, I guess even government (organization) that — and we're not a government organization, we're a private organization, but — we're the only organization that insurance companies are partnering with to train their clients. Philadelphia Insurance is a partner of ours. Hanover Insurance is a partner of ours. Church Mutual of Wisconsin, who insures about 4,000 houses of worship in the United States. They're the largest church insurer in the country. They are a partner with us. It's because we don't look at things like we call it one and done. Where someone comes and gives a lecture and leaves and that's the last time you get anything. Or you just get an emergency operation plan in your book and you don't train it. You're not keeping training records. When we're looking at things we're looking at not only how do you defend yourself during an event. It's how do you defend yourself in the aftermath of an event.

DG: I have a question based on that. Do organizations get any kind of discount on insurance premiums if they've had training?

JH: Some insurance companies are actually working with their clients to send them the training, so the client doesn't have to pay for the training. That's with the insurance companies. We don't work with that end of it. That's what the insurance companies decide what their clients want to do. A lot of times they've brought them in — we do presentations, so people understand how to do this correctly. The insurance companies will sometimes pay for their clients to come to those because they're all about mitigation of casualties and risk. When you have an incident in Las Vegas that it looks like the loss insurance-wise from that event is going to be over a billion dollars, one guy with a gun did a billion dollars’ worth of damage. It's wasn't to infrastructure. It was largely to people.

DG: Wow.

JH: Just actually yesterday the coroner's office released that every single person that died during the Las Vegas event was shot to death. No one was trampled. No one was injured during the evacuation; well, not injured, but no one was killed during the evacuation. When you're talking about that many deaths from one individual coming back either on the hotel, or the concert promoter, or the security firm, or law enforcement in the city, those lawsuits are all going to get filed. It basically comes down to how you're going to defend yourself. That becomes an issue.

DG: Right, and obviously you can't put a price on life per se. I do have another question regarding the training. Is it a role play? Do you actually have timed sequences? How does that work?

JH: Yeah, we actually set up training with people. We use e-Learning. We like people to do tabletops. The physical drills, though, really is where you learn how to do things. Most human beings learn kinesthetically better than they do sitting in a class and getting a lecture. They learn better when they have e-Learning in conjunction with the lecture, in conjunction with scenarios. We do all of those because we know human beings have better retention when different means are given information to them. We all learn differently.

I know personally that I'm a kinesthetic learner. I see most of the people in my classes are kinesthetic learners. You kind of understand in a lecture what I'm talking about, but until you actually have to put those things into use, you don't understand how they work for you. I've had lots of people in class. You know we train everyone from law enforcement. I've had military personnel including special forces people in class. Down to an administrative secretary in a healthcare facility or a secretary in a healthcare facility. Our classes come from all walks of life.

It is amazing what people say they're going to do and then what they actually do when we place them in a scenario. We actually put them in rooms, and hallways, and buildings with a faux gunman. It's not a real gunman. Obviously, we put them in the facility. The human reaction of people to the threat, and even though it's just a scenario, and we're not going full go with people and tackling, and all that kind of stuff. Really, just the very stress of knowing that the scenario has begun and how your body reacts. I have had people, law enforcement officers, military personnel, literally when the gunman is in contact with them, turn and run into walls.

DG: Wow.

JH: They did not think they were going to do that, but they'd never been placed in this situation before. Mental stimulation is an okay way of training and thinking about what you're going to do. If this happens, I'm going to do this or I'm going to go here. Actually, being placed in a situation, you do not know what your body’s going to do until it actually has to do it. I've had people, not often, but I have had people sporadically fall on the ground and curl up in balls. That is not the normal human response. I see that in about one or two percent in classes. I only see about one to two percent of the people in classes, and some of them that are highly trained in military and law enforcement, actually swarm the gunman immediately. It takes them a few seconds to begin figuring out what to do. Obviously, we want to shorten that time, so that when people process information, they process it quickly.

We have to realize something. The incident in Las Vegas. The sniper type incident has happened before with active shooter. Those are anomalies. Most of the people who commit this crime are not highly trained. The FBI statistical data from the 2014 study that they put out said about two percent of these individuals are considered to have training. When you look at the individual in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. He had some training, but interestingly, the coroner's office said that most of the victims shot in the Pulse nightclub, there's 99 of them, were shot from a distance of three feet away. That doesn't require any skill set. What those people are doing in that three-foot instance makes a huge difference. The initial incident’s always a surprise when it occurs.

What you really want to think about is what's going on after that one second when you do realize something's happening. Now what are you doing? I never could understand — this is over 10 years ago when the Virginia Tech incident happened. I'm a university police officer. I get put on a committee at the university to find something for 110 buildings and 45,000 people to do in my cafeterias, in my gyms, in my auditoriums, in my classrooms, in my offices, outside the buildings, in my stadiums. I had to find something to do in all of those locations. I was stunned when I talked to people who told me that they had been trained only to try to hide and that was it. I was even more stunned because they were only trying to hide in buildings in which every room was occupied. The whole response didn't make any sense.

DG: Joe, I know that you travel a lot for your job. Are you authorized to intervene if you should come across an active shooter situation or would you be held liable? What I'm asking is, are you only authorized for training? Then also, in your training do you address other possible scenarios other than guns such as those involving a different type of weapon?

JH: Sure, I'll answer the first part first. Obviously, anybody is covered if they have to respond to an active shooter regardless of location. When we train tactics, we just don't train you for your healthcare facility. We train so that those concepts are portable, and that you take them with you no matter where you are, whether you're in your house of worship, or you're at the grocery store, or Walmart, or Target. It doesn't matter. All the responses remain the same. What doesn't remain the same is your option. You might have an option to have to use countermeasures, which is for contact with the threat, or evacuation, or you might be able to barricade, lockdown your facility. Those things would apply to me regardless of where I am. I'm in all kinds of facilities from hospitals, universities to businesses, large warehouses. Anyone should be authorized to respond. If I was at a concert, I would still be responding to the active shooter even though I'm not in an official role or anything as far as what my job is or what my job used to be. Does that answer that question for you?

DG: Yes, definitely.

JH: Good. The second question as far as weapons goes. We do not just — as a company, we do not refer to these events as active shooter. That's a catch-all phrase that was developed in the 1990s. We refer to them as violent critical incidents because the suspects do not limit themselves in weapons. They use explosive devices, bombs, fire, knives, edged weapons, bats. There's been incident with chainsaws. Bad guys don’t limit themselves, and we should not be limiting our thinking in how we're going to respond to them. Now, the responses in training, regardless of what the weapon is, are the same. It's not any different, so whether it's a firearm or a knife — and actually knives potentially are even more deadly than firearms. We really don't want people just to think that oh, I use this if there's a guy with a gun, but if there's a guy with a knife, I don't know what to do. It's the same response and the same options apply.

DG: Good to know. You also mentioned risk assessments. Could you go into a little bit more detail about that?

JH: Sure. One of the things that we started doing — we used to get asked to do risk assessments, physical security assessments, things like that all the time by clients. We did not do them until recently, and when we decided to do them, we decided to do them correctly. Number one, a facility, you can conduct your own risk assessment, but it’s really not a good idea. That’s not what your insurance companies want to see. Probably every three or four years they want you to hire outside people to come in, a different set of eyes on the facility to look at it and actually do a formal risk assessment and write things up that they see, review your policies. All of those things should be happening every three or four years. It’s because we don’t do those — and we’ve just recently started to really push them in the country because, quite honestly, we’ve had a lot of events occur, and when you go back and look at policies and you see policies where people were required to sit on the ground, not move, and be quiet when someone was killing them, that screams of an improper risk assessment or no risk assessment. It was just “I have a policy.” I’ve seen stuff where people have downloaded a risk assessment off the internet, and I say “risk assessment” in quotes. Think that if they check boxes on it they have a good plan. They have no idea what they’re doing.

You went over my background earlier. I thought I knew a lot about physical security and risk assessment. It was not until I went through ASIS International’s board certification process in order to become an international professional in doing this and how to do them correctly. If risk assessment and threat assessment was a bucket, I probably realize now that I knew about an inch in the bottom of that bucket from my career in the military and as a law enforcement officer. There were some things I knew and knew certain sections of things, but I did not realize how in depth the procedures are, how to do these assessments, how to look at things.

DG: What is ASIS?

JH: ASIS International is the largest security organization in the world. It is the gold standard as far as security organizations go. They’re not a company or anything like that. They are the organization that writes the standards for security in the world for everything from cameras, lighting, physical security. They have textbooks on how to do this correctly. We decided as a company that there’s a lot of — I see a lot of things. As a law enforcement officer, I got confronted with this — and it was one of the, now I realize it was one of the dumbest things I was ever asked to do — was to conduct physical security assessments at facilities as a law enforcement officer. I had absolutely no training anywhere in my law enforcement career how to conduct a physical security assessment. You read documents, and it says work in conjunction your physical security with local law enforcement. I had no clue what I was doing when I went places. People want to recommend gadgets and cameras and all this stuff and everything, and they have no idea what they’re even recommending or how it works with other security measures that the facility has.

We were required by the company to go through. We’re talking. I’m a little older than 50 years old. I hadn’t been studying textbooks for a long time since I was in college. The amount of reading and the amount of studying, I probably ended up studying over 250 hours. It’s a board exam, several hours, well over a hundred and some questions, and the questions are like the ones you always loved when you were in school. There’s four answers. They’re all correct. Choose the best one, that kind of stuff.

DG: Didn’t you love it?

JH: Oh, I loved that test. It was great. I walked out of there feeling okay about it. I passed with a fairly decent score, but it was unbelievably hard. I found out later on that somewhere between 40 and — you actually have to apply to study for the test, you just can’t say “I want to take the test,” you have to apply to study for it, and then you have to apply to take the test. I found out after I took the test that somewhere, dependent where you’re at, that roughly 40 to 60 percent of the people who supposedly have been approved to study for the test fail the actual exam when they take it, so it’s not easy.

DG: No.

JH: The people that work for the company, there’s three of us now that have the board certification to do this. We talk to each other all the time, and learn from each other and things we’re seeing in the field. I read other people’s assessments that have been done on properties. Some of them are government agencies that went in and did assessments for facilities, and when I walked out, their risk managers and their insurance company are saying, “You found twice as many things as the government agency that did the original assessment that certified us to operate.” I’m like, “Well, it’s just — it’s crazy some of the stuff you see in the field.”

DG: Right. Can you share any examples of how your training’s actually been used? I know that several years ago a hospital in Bucks County, PA was under lockdown because of an active shooter, and tragically, a police officer was fatally shot. That stuck with me. Do you have any positive outcomes based on your training that you could share with us?

JH: Sure. In fact, this year in West Liberty, Ohio, there was a school district at West Liberty. They had an active shooter. It was a student. He began shooting in their — one of the men’s restrooms in the high school wing of the building. This is a K-through-12 facility with different wings in it. They have a high school, junior high, and grade school wing.

That event, when it started, it started in the morning before classes started. A student who ends up being shot and survives goes into the restroom. Actually, he’s supposed to be leaving on a bus that day to go to, basically, a forensic speech and debate kind of event. Goes into the restroom to check his hair to make sure his hair is okay and ends up getting shot by the suspect who’s loading a shotgun in the bathroom when he walks in. There’s a large number of students in the hallway. They hear the gunshots. They either evacuate the building or run in the classrooms. By the time the suspect leaves the restroom, the hallway is empty. Almost the entire high school wing except for one room has evacuated, and they did not do what we would consider normal evacuation where they get out and walk in the hallway and leave. They actually went through their windows they broke.

During the briefing from the principal and superintendent, they had been told by the company that installed their windows that the windows open. That people could get out of them. They found out the windows only opened eight inches, so the high school students broke out the windows, took the glass — basically, raked the glass out of the frames and climbed out the windows. The gunman breached two classrooms that had been locked. Beyond those locked doors, the students and the teachers in the room had barricaded the doors so that he could not gain entry, even though the locked door was breached, and there was no one in the room when he breached it. They were all gone.

Except for the student that was shot and one classroom that could not leave because of their proximity to the door and the window that they had, which they’re currently in the process of fixing, they couldn’t leave. They barricaded their location and prepared countermeasures inside if the gunman tried to breach their room, but he did not. Three hundred and seventy-five people got out of that school probably in less than a minute and were not contacted by the gunman. That’s the kind of thing the training does. That’s an ALICE facility. Two staff members at the school ended up swarming the gunman and gaining control of him, and they held him on the ground for five minutes until law enforcement got there.

DG: That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I know you’ve compared this active shooter training industry to the Wild, Wild West. How can an organization that’s interested in training vet the training provider? How can you tell that a training provider is legitimate?

JH: That’s probably the best question in the entire thing so far. You want to look at things from a realistic standpoint. There’s other companies I’ve seen out there. It was after Sandy Hook. There was just like — all of a sudden, there were all these companies that literally just sprouted right out of the ground that were going to do active shooter training, and recommendations changed from the federal government. All of a sudden, I mean, it turned into — it went from “We shouldn’t be doing this” in the argument against ALICE from a lot of people to everyone was trying to do it because there was the almighty dollar involved, which is sad. When you’re looking at a provider who’s going to give you training, are they just coming in to give a lecture? If you’re just getting a lecture, that’s not training. Would you like to have surgery from a doctor that sat through a lecture and is now doing brain surgery on you?

DG: No.

JH: Obviously not. No. You would like them to practice what they’re doing before they operate on you. This is no different. This is a lifesaving thing. If I told you as a child, if there’s fire in this building, this is what you do and I never practiced crawling underneath the smoke, touch the door, stop, drop, and roll, knock your friend on the ground and use your own body to extinguish the flames and how to evacuate the building physically and have you do it, would you know how to respond to a fire from a lecture? Obviously not?

DG: Probably not.

JH: Right. I have seen people go in and give a lecture, and tell people, hey, if this happens, run, hide, fight. They make them watch a six-minute video from the City of Houston about it, which was never meant to be training. It was just supposed to be an exposition what you could do, and then talk about a little bit. Show them how to maybe slide a belt over a door, and the training’s over. Companies have done this. They’ve made people sign off that they’ve had active shooter training. They’ve had nothing.

DG: Sure. It reminds me of CPR training. I’ve taken training, and until you actually do it with the dummies, you really don’t get it.

JH: No.

DG: It’s similar to that.

JH: I’ve actually done advanced life — we use to have to do advanced lifesaving training as a police officer, and just a couple months before I retired, I actually had to use an AED on a guy and ended up saving his life. It was real different even putting the AED on a person who I knew was dying rather than just being in the classroom, and that was a lot of stress. If you’ve done that training before and put an AED on everybody, you always pretty much do it from the side. I suddenly had to do it from the guy’s head because of where he had fallen between the house and the vehicle. There was no other way to get to him, and I had to do everything correctly. There was water on the ground. I mean, all the things they tell you to watch out for, and it was all coming back to me from my training what to do.

I mean, it was a high-stress situation, and I had to remember where to put the two pads in reference to being at the gentleman’s head rather than next to him on his side. That stopped me for about one second. I had to think. Which way do these go? That’s high stress. If I hadn’t done that, though, in the class, the physical skillset, and someone had just told me from watching the video or a lecture what to do, that gentleman would probably be dead today.

DG: True. Where are we in terms of security training today in the country, and then where do you see the future of security training heading?

JH: I think we’re seeing security training, as far as overall as a population — when Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 incident came out with “See Something, Say Something,” things started to change. There are still a lot of places I go. They’re relying on someone else to come save them, whether it’s their internal security or law enforcement. An active violent critical incident is not that kind of event. You actually are the first responder. It is not law enforcement. It is not someone else. It is you. You have to start making decisions.

In order for you to make those decisions, you have to be trained. I mean, it’s obvious. One of the unfortunate things I saw in law enforcement is, anytime there were budget cuts, training was the first thing that got put on the chopping block. Unfortunately, I think on a lot of the lawsuits we see, after training got axed and people making mistakes, isn’t because the person intentionally made a mistake, or did something wrong, or intended to hurt somebody, or whatever in law enforcement. It was because the training was poor. Who’s training? What are they training? Is it enough so that you can learn something when you walk out of the room?

I would never expect anybody from a lecture to think that they could stop an active shooter, but I’ve seen people do it. I’ve seen training where people tell me that — one of the weirdest questions I ever got — “There’s training out there that tells you, if you’re in contact with the gunman, gouge his eyes out.” I’m thinking to myself: How do you even practice that?

DG: Yeah. Good luck with that, right?

JH: Yeah. I mean, weapons take-away, this is one that is really — it should be a huge red flag for anybody doing active shooter training. If the company is attempting to teach civilians how to do weapons take-aways, it’s useless. The skillset required to do a weapons take-away — I was a law enforcement officer and a Marine for 33 years. It is one of the most difficult things you will ever do in the world. Everything has to be perfect. The suspect’s moving. You’re moving. Doing that for an hour or two in a class gives a totally false sense of security.

We train everything that is already in people’s wheelhouses with — “countering” is not just trying to — and I hate this word because it doesn’t even make sense. How do you even fight a gunman? When I read policies and it says people are going to fight a gunman, “fight” has a legal definition already in the United States, and it doesn’t mean what we’re trying to say to do with this. We use “counter.” It’s actually what’s happening. Directed violence against you and you’re attempting to counter it. That involves movement, noise, distraction, and swarming techniques.

You see all those being highly used in a location that you don’t think about normally. It’s called Chuck E. Cheese. There’s a ton of movement. There’s a ton of noise. There’s a ton of distraction. People are pushing each other to get to games and all this stuff, these kids. It’s chaos. You actually want chaos, not organizational skills in the middle of an event. It actually disrupts the bad guy who’s an individual who can only focus on one thing at a time too, and if he has to focus on 300 different things, it’s impossible for them to do so.

All of that makes a huge difference and actually doing things and training people properly, and not making them do things like — I saw one. I had a class where someone asked me when am I going to get to the part of the class where we hit the gunman with a fire extinguisher. I was like, “What are you talking about?” They’re like, “Well, we had a trainer come in.” I guess he was at this facility three years before I was there. Honest to God’s truth, they went out and bought fire extinguishers for every room in the facility. Not to put fires out but to hit gunman with them.

I was like, “I’m sorry. There’s no skillset I can train you to hit a gunman with a fire extinguisher or shoot a fire extinguisher at a gunman. I mean, it might be an optional countermeasure in a room or it may not be, but if you’re teaching a single object that’s going to keep you safe, you’re already losing.”

DG: Right. I think any single approach is wrong. You need multiple strategies. Thank you so much, Joe, for sharing your expertise with us today. I think this was — it’s such an important topic, and to all our listeners, thank you for tuning in. For more information on today’s topic, visit alicetraining.com, and if you’d like to learn more about SmartLinx Solutions and our fully integrated suite of Workforce Management Solutions, visit us online at smartlinxsolutions.com.

JH: Thank you so much for having me.

DG: You’re welcome.

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