The Sandy Hook Solution: Ask a Soldier

Ask a Soldier

There’s nothing sadder than clicking on CNN and reading that twenty school children and six adults were killed in a school shooting in Connecticut. It’s been a few weeks since the Sandy HookElementary School shooting, and I’m disappointed. America doesn’t seem to be learning from it’s mistakes.

Sadly, since that day, New York has passed stricter gun laws, President Obama has proposed stricter gun laws, and there is a general call for teachers to be armed. I’m not against this. What I’m against, is the fact that no one has suggested anything to stop the children from being shot or harmed. The only suggestions out there gaining momentum are measures designed to limit the number of casualties, not stop them.

Some kids got shot. They were at an elementary school. Twenty of them were killed and six adults. Where did this happen? You know that. It was at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.           

Sadly, since that day, New York has passed stricter gun laws, President Obama has promised stricter gun laws, and there is a general call for teachers to be armed. I’m not against this. What I’m against, is the fact that no one has suggested anything to stop the children from being shot or harmed. 

Last night, while my nine year old lay in the floor playing with her toys, I read another article about Sandy Hook, and the shooting, and realized something that every law enforcement officer and every politician should already know.  

There is a science to defense. Don’t believe me? Ask a soldier. 

Let’s explore the psychology and science of reaction. 

You are sitting in your living room. You hear a loud sound. The sound is brief and only occurs once. If you can’t pinpoint the exact location. You search your house first, then go to the door and look outside for the source. Generally, you’ll wait at the threshold for it to happen again, and if your neighbor comes out to investigate it, you’ll ask him or her where it sounded like it came from.  

The algorithm for reaction is: Hear it, seek it, find it, and react to it. 

In the school shooting, we saw this. The gunman shoots through the door and gains access, three faculty members come out to seek the source of the noise, they find it and some die, while one reacts and runs away wounded and possibly calls the police. While police react, the gunman marches into one room and kills all the students and teacher, then marches into another classroom and kills a few more kids and that teacher too. Police arrive by then, and the gunman shoots himself. Media makes him famous.

It was very sad and tragic, and my hope and desire isn’t to make this painful for anyone involved with the shooting or who has lost loved ones. However, the tragedy needs to be dissected. Because, creating stricter gun laws isn’t going to fix the problem. Let me prove this point. Understand, if one child or adult dies in any scenario, the measure has failed. 

The gunman in this scenario wields an axe instead of a gun. 

He uses the axe to chop the door into kindling. It takes longer to gain access. The faculty hears the noise. They come out to seek its source. They discover it. They react by calling the police or by trying to stop the man. The man kills or wounds some of the faculty with the axe, marches into the closest classroom and starts killing kids and teachers. Police arrive and either arrest him or shoot him, and again, the media makes him famous. 

Effected outcome: Fewer students and faculty killed.

Gun ban effectiveness: Possibly a 30% to 50% reduction in the number of deaths. 

Opinion: Gun ban only partially failed, but was moderately effective. People died, however. Gun ban fails to prevent death of students and faculty. 

The next scenario involves teachers who are armed. 

I will give you a best results outcome in this situation. The gunman uses his gun to breach the door. The faculty comes out to investigate, most likely their guns will be locked away to keep kids from gaining access to them. The gunman kills some of the curious faculty just as he did in the real shooting tragedy. Let’s face it, they weren’t prepared for this. The gunman moves into closest classroom and starts shooting students. The teacher in there had time to react. She found her key, unlocks desk or wherever the gun is stored, removes the gun and shoots gunman. The police eventually arrive and the media makes the gunman famous. 

Effected outcome: Office faculty dead or wounded, students dead and wounded, gunman dead or incapacitated.

Armed teacher effectiveness: Possibly a 30% to 50% reduction in number of deaths. 

Opinion: Arming teachers moderately effective, but ultimately fails since it did not prevent faculty and students from being killed. 

I told you to ask a soldier about defense. 

You see, defense is what is needed here. A reaction only comes after several other necessary steps are completed. 

The algorithm again is: Hear it, seek it, find it, and react to it. 

The problem inherent in this is that the time between hearing it and reacting to it are too far apart. It allows too much time to elapse. 

In all of the above scenarios the following occurred: 

• Hear it: A disturbance was detected. It takes around ten seconds to acknowledge the disturbance.  

      Total time: 10 seconds. 

• Seek it: The faculty had to seek out the disturbance. The office faculty was closest and could respond in about twenty seconds. The further away the faculty from the disturbance, the greater the seek time is. The office faculty had no kids to deal with and were able to react quickly to an unfamiliar sounding disturbance. The teacher in the first classroom had to deal with children and her reaction time would have been slightly longer by about twenty or thirty seconds.  

      Total seek time for office faculty: 20 seconds

Total seek time for closest teacher: 40 seconds

• Find it: Once the faculty located the disturbance, they had to understand it. In a best scenario situation this should take 5 seconds. In this situation, the amount of reaction time varies. You figure, five seconds for   the faculty to recognize threat and ten seconds for them to struggle with their conscience and move on to the reaction step. Total time 15 seconds, but this time can increase depending on the mental preparedness of the faculty; complete surprise, lack of training, and fear can make this time grow quickly. In reality, the reaction time would be in the 30 second range or higher. However, this is the algorithm that describes what happens in this kind of situation:

 

1.   What am I seeing? (Man with gun 2 seconds)
2.   What should I do? (Stop him or call for help 3 seconds)
3.   Stop him. (Faculty gets killed or is successful 5 seconds)
4.   Call for help. (Run away 10 seconds or more)    

• React to it: Reacting to it is where we run into the most number of casualties. For instance, in the Sandy Hook shooting, the first responders to the tragedy–the office faculty–were killed and wounded. What does this mean. It means that the two who were killed never got to react, and the reaction time of the one who escaped was extended because of her wounds. This means that the next person to react was the teacher in the first classroom, which I already informed you, would have had a longer seek time because of the children. Let’s say that she reacted by calling the police in the first scenario. It took the police twenty minutes to respond to the initial call from the school. If you’ve been paying attention, then you realize that the original algorithm is coming into play . . . again. Now the police have to hear it, seek it, find it, and react to it. 

• In the three scenarios listed above, the reaction time would be different for everyone. In the first scenario, no faculty was armed and there was no gun ban and the number of deaths was at 26. In the second scenario, guns are banned and the number of deaths was approximately 13. In the third scenario, teachers are armed and the number of deaths is still approximately 13. If we combined a gun ban with armed teachers the number of deaths may be lowered to nine. Unfortunately, the times in the algorithm don’t change. Combining the two won’t lower the number of deaths by half with each change to the scenario. 

Total time to react before police arrive: 10 seconds. 

            Total approximate overall time for algorithm to play out without cops: 1 min 15 seconds 

            Total overall time for algorithm to play out with cops: 1m 15secs + 1m 15secs + 20 minutes = 22 minutes 30 seconds.

 

The reaction time will vary based on what solution to the problem the teacher or faculty selects to save themselves and their children. 

Ready to be scared? The gunman doesn’t have to hear it, seek it, or find it. He or she already knows all of this. He or she planned this out. He or she only has to react. The gunman’s reaction include aiming or pointing of the gun and pulling of the trigger. 

The amount of time it takes for average person to point and pull a trigger is 1 second. It takes one second for a gunman to point and pull the trigger. In the total time for the algorithm without cops, the gunman had enough time to shoot seventy-five victims. In the scenario with the police, the gunman, technically had enough time to shoot one thousand three hundred and fifty victims had they been available to him. Now, in each of these body count projections the numbers would be lower only because the gunman would have to reload and because the victims were spread out and not in the same room. If this doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what would. 

So, how do we fix this and get the number of deaths to zero? We do this by investing in defense. If it had taken the gunman longer to get through the front door, then the faculty would have had more time for any of their reactions to be carried out. Once inside the door, the gunman had access to the entire school. Those reacting had to take time to call, connect, and explain what was happening before the police could respond. 

Some have proposed that we hire security guards for all of our schools. Unfortunately, that is financially prohibitive. If we arm teachers, that poses all kinds of new risk; Accidental shootings, lack of training, collateral damage if there are situations, and the simple fact, that most teachers are as innocent as their children–with respect of course.  

Some have called for stricter gun laws, but I’ve already proved that this has only a marginal effect on the number of deaths and doesn’t prevent them at all. 

I say this for the record–one death is too many. Any solution that doesn’t protect the students and faculty one hundred percent is unacceptable. So, I’ve considered a number of possible safeguards to protect against future threats of this nature. 

1. Slow the gunman’s access to the school. This can be done by making the windows near the doors narrower and fill them with safety glass so that gunman can’t shoot them out and squeeze through.
2. Install external doors that grant access to the school with a breach resistant design and narrow panes of safety glass. This is designed to hinder the gunman’s access via that avenue.
3. Install breach resistant doors on all classrooms with narrow pane safety glass windows and install them with an emergency electronic locking mechanism that can be activated from the office. If there’s a problem, the principle hits the button and all doors in the school are locked immediately creating additional barriers to slow a gunman or stop him or her.
4. Include multiple interior doors that can be remotely locked from the office. These will act like baffles in the hall to slow or prevent the gunman’s advance.
5. The office should be built much like a panic room to protect the first responders and defenders.
6. The office should be located between the front exit and a second entry door just beyond the office.
7. A second security door should be located just beyond all outside doors that grant access to the school.
8. The inner security doors should be located in close proximity to the outside doors. This will minimize the gunman’s ability to maneuver, making it more difficult to breach the second door.
9. I believe classrooms should be equipped with tazers and pepper guns (non-lethal guns that shoot balls filled with eye, skin, and breathing irritants). Combined, the tazer and pepper guns are more than capable of subduing an assailant without causing collateral damage.
10. I believe that the office and only faculty who have taken gun and security training, and passed, should be allowed to carry a gun. I believe these weapons should be locked up at all times. I believe these guns should be loaded with the same ammunition that air marshals use on planes; Ammunition designed not to breach a planes hull. In the school, it should minimize any chance of collateral damage.
11. Cameras should be installed in every hall and outside and inside every exit from the school.
12. Alarms on every external door should be installed to alert office personel to their use.
13. There should be an evacuation plan that combines students into neighboring classrooms without windows should violence come via the windows.
14. Finally, I believe all schools should have an alarm button to summon police immediately without having to explain to 911 why you’re calling them. Banks and gas stations have these buttons, and I believe our schools should too. The button would be used only in the eventuality of school shootings and threats of violence of a mortal nature. 

I believe these measures wouldn’t be cost prohibitive and would save and prevent the loss of innocent lives. Realistically, these safeguards would be a one time cost of approximately thirty to forty thousand dollars, which is approximately what the school would pay for one security guard for a year. Nationally, the amount of implementing these changes is huge, but when you consider each schools budget, it isn’t that formidable. It just has to be a priority for the school. Any goal can be achieved so long as the goal is considered important. 

How much is one of your kids worth? 

In addition to these safe guards, I would also like to suggest the passing of a new infamy law. It would be passed limiting all news and media reference to the killer or killers. Instead, I think law enforcement should issue a suspect number instead to be used by all news and media agencies to limit the gunmen or murderer’s fame. I believe that if individuals realize that they can’t become famous for conducting mass shootings, then they will seek other venues for their desire of infamy and fame. 

Finally, I am sickened by our politicians and our general population, because no one is suggesting solutions. They’re only offering up ineffectual actions to placate the angered population. 

I say again, ask a soldier, they know how to protect what they love. They’ve been protecting America for years.