Violence in the workplace affects everybody; if you’re in a supermarket, it’s somebody’s workplace. Workers these days may be asked to review emergency procedures to protect themselves and others, and that was what I experienced this week. I saw a short presentation about active shooter safety entitled “Run, Hide, Fight: Surviving an Active Shooter Event” from the Department of Homeland Security and the city of Houston, TX.
I found it mildly disturbing, and not because of what you might think. In the first minute of the video, a clean-cut black clad man calmly walks into an office lobby, pulls a highly lethal weapon from a backpack and opens fire with precision, cutting down two people–one a security guard–on camera and a fleeing employee out of sight. The overall sense of dread as employees act out the prescribed scenarios modeling the choice to run, hide or fight when confronted with an active shooter then play out.
“Run, hide, fight” is the DHS prescribed way to deal with a shooter in your office. In short, if you can escape, leave your things and get out, and try to take other people out with you; if you can’t escape, hide as best you can; if those will not work, grab anything you can use as a weapon and aggressively fight the shooter for your life.
Three workers run from the building and stop a man parking his bicycle from going in, as a woman in the group dials 911. A group of employees in a break area push furniture in front of a door, while two women hide in different spaces: a cubicle and in a dimmed office with a copier blocking the door. When the break area employees realize the shooter will come in for them, the men grab chairs and other objects, a panicked woman moves to a corner out of the way, and when the shooter enters the action freezes and then cuts to the responding rescuers looking for their suspect.
That was what disturbed me. What happened after that?
The old saying attributed to Anton Chekhov (and never really accurately quoted) is that a gun revealed in act one needs to be fired by the end of the play. An apt saying for this kind of situation, because we know the confrontation is coming, but then we are cheated out of it. There is no resolution to the incident, and any writer would likely pick that up immediately and question it, including me. The rest of the video plays out, showing workers racing to safety behind emergency vehicles and such, but the story wraps up without going back to the break area. The video runs slightly less than six minutes, but they could have wrapped up the story with four seconds more.
I wanted to see the gunman on the floor of the break area, knocked out cold by the man wielding the chair. I wanted to see the leader of the group holding the gun pointed at the gunman, or better yet, the gunman, sans widow maker, running down the hall for dear life and into the hands of law enforcement. Anything but what we got: nothing.
If we’re going to be proactive enough to deactivate an active shooter, we could benefit from seeing that it can be done. We don’t even need to know the how, just that it can happen. If we can’t deter them, beat them.
(Because I don’t want to disturb or offend readers, I am not providing a link to the video, but you can choose to view it or not on your own and see what you think.)
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