A short rant about active shooter training

The police state is coming for us, whether we want it or not.

I told myself I probably didn’t need to do this, and hell I’ve already tweeted about it, so it’s not like I should spend any more time venting than I already have. But sometimes thoughts just really buzz around in your head and you get distracted by them and the best thing to do is just force yourself to articulate. exactly. what. is driving you so crazy, you know?

Today I had mandatory active shooter training at the United States federal courthouse where I work. There have been multiple sessions of this particular training offered over the last couple months, but I begrudgingly waited until the last possible week to sign up. The two-hour training (did I mention it was mandatory?) was put on by one of the Deputy U.S. Marshals¹ who works here, and it featured live lecture, question-and-answer, and a series of instructional videos, with the videos relying heavily on actor simulations of active shooter events.

Honestly one of the most secure, barricaded buildings in the city.

First, some caveats: I do work in a courthouse. It’s open to the public. We have security here, and we should.² Training that tells employees “here’s what the alarm will sound like if there’s ever an active shooter event / here’s where you should go if you can / here’s where the stairwells are” — I get how that makes sense. That should take about five minutes. It literally is a meeting that could have been an email. But that’s not what this was.

Rather, the training is designed as two hours of Avoid, Deny, Defend, Run, Hide, Fight — Here’s what to do if you must fight your way to safety — You have a Right to Defend Yourself (that phrase was used multiple times) — You Deserve to Get Home Safe to Your Family (also used multiple times — with lots of imagery and language evoking “your family” as people who you owe a duty to and you must fight to see them at the end of the day). There were discussions of what happened at the Pulse shooting (know the early warning signs! see something say something!), and the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (deadliest attack since 9/11! Did you know the shooter was also targeting Lollapalooza in Chicago?!) and a video featuring Sandy Hook parents. The deputy marshal leading the training had war story after war story about friends-of-friends whose children were abducted and people who were Just Minding Their Own Business when Disaster Struck. We learned about all the bulletproof reinforced barricades in the courtrooms and watched multiple videos in which actors (not very good actors, but actors!) in business casual attire pretended that they were confronted with the question of what to do in the possible final minutes of their lives.

Please take a moment to plan where you would hide in this room while you wait to possibly be killed.

I should probably say more about how over the top this all was, but the truth is I left the training after 53 minutes. I walked out. Couldn’t take the police state hypervigilance lecture. Didn’t appreciate the gross emotional manipulation, the constant Jack Bauer undertone of You Must Take this Seriously, or the DUN DUN duh DUH DUH adrenaline-pumping soundtrack to all the “safety” videos. If it’s a safety video, why does it feel like I’m watching an action movie, exactly? The guy doing the voice over narration sure seems excited to be part of this awesome story. No thanks.

The thing is, yes, I get it. Danger does exist, and bad things happen. Even one of the judges in this very court house had her family murdered by someone who was seeking revenge for the way the judge had ruled in his case. We all know horror stories about people who were murdered or who were the victim of crime or who were witness to horrible trauma.³ But most of us don’t think “that shit is cool,” somehow. We don’t marinate in it — we don’t fixate on the high-octane drama of shootings in public places, don’t fantasize about how many exists there are when we walk into a room or think “I can never sit down with my back to the door, lest a crazed madman burst in with a shotgun.” We’re normal people, and we just live our lives. I don’t fucking like guns, I don’t fetishize them, and I don’t want to pretend that I’m constantly living life on the edge, only one violent incident away from death. That’s not weakness on my part. That’s me being a sane person who doesn’t secretly wish for a lifetime of trauma-induced PTSD.

The overwhelming sense that comes from these breathless, sensationalized active shooter trainings is that the instructors desperately, pathetically want bad things to happen so that they can leap into action. Security work is boring by definition and hugely uneventful, but the dude in the tactical vest with a gun strapped to his waist at all times doesn’t want to talk about how boring it is, so instead we get this. Somehow it’s always the same savior complex alpha male Protect Your Family dudes who go into this line of work, and we all suffer for it. There is no calm, rational, sober discourse. There is only Be Afraid, Be Vigilant, Join Us In Our Survivalist World View. I hate it.

I have no clue what I would do in a real-life active shooter situation. Probably, I would be nervous and very anxious, and if I was lucky enough to survive, I would need lots of therapy to process what had happened. But I am all but certain that if I did survive, my survival would 100% be attributed to luck. I would be lucky that I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. If there was some weapon available to me and I defended myself (it sounds absurd to even picture this), I would be lucky that I managed to escape. I would not suddenly become Rambo, and it’s idiotic to spend time picturing scenarios where that could actually happen. It’s like asking what I would do if I was going 80 mph on the highway and my breaks failed. Or if the elevator I rode up to my office suddenly went into freefall. These things could happen, I suppose, and they would be bad! But I don’t need to lay out disaster porn game plans for it. I’m not fucking John McClain, and this isn’t Die Hard.

Anyway. You get the idea. (I did say at the top that this was a rant). I know I’m probably a little extreme in my pacifism about this sort of thing. I was raised by lefty liberal Catholic parents who listened to a lot of Simon & Garfunkel — we weren’t exactly tuning in to watch COPS. The thing is though — I’m convinced that this police state paranoia actually makes us less safe. It’s counterproductive. Instead of figuring out how to solve genuinely hard problems about access to guns and how to treat violent people with profound mental illness, we instead get an atmosphere that says This is cool! We might be going to war at your workplace, so get ready!! If the primary solution to senseless acts of violence in everyday life is to be armed to the teeth and ready to fight our way out, we’re just going to breed more senseless acts of violence. We all start to live life on a hair trigger. I’m not going to live that way.

UPDATE: And as if the world isn’t fucked up enough already, in the time that it took me to write this post, we’ve heard news of yet another school shooting in Texas. It’s heartbreaking and it’s infuriating. It makes me hate the dramatic sensationalized nature of the training that much more. These events are real, and the dangers they pose are horrible, and I refuse to believe that the solution to this lies in being MORE militaristic, MORE aggressive with civilian gun ownership, and MORE ready to just embrace the idea that everyday life can be a war zone. There is a calm, rational way to debate what should be done here and to offer constructive solutions. Fantasizing about what it would be like to kick the bad guys in the teeth is just that. It’s fantasy. It belongs in a movie. It’s disaster porn. Now I’m even more mad.

1. The Marshals Service is a federal law enforcement agency that broadly serves two functions. First, they provide personal security for federal judges. And second, they execute arrest warrants. But they don’t generally “investigate” crimes or bring indictments like the FBI. They are men (almost always men) with a badge and a gun.

2. I’m only sort of convinced of this myself. In truth, the metal detectors and the ID checks and the take-your-belt-off-please stuff in the lobby all serves to make the building seem “important,” but does it actually keep us safer in a material sense? Has anyone even bothered to check?

3. I grew up in a very small town in southwest Missouri (like, 1300 people), and honestly the amount of high-drama crime we had in that town was just insane. It was common, local knowledge within the village just in the 16 years I lived there that there had been two bank robberies, at least two or three murders (one of the murders was committed by one of the guys who had previously done time for one of the bank robberies), one sexual predator who abused kids, and multiple instances of arson. Seriously so many arsons. The place was like a soap opera. Also, my parents and I witnessed one of the bank robberies, but I was only 2 years old, so I don’t remember it.