Editor’s note: Later this week, look for a Times Record News story about legal issues associated with using a weapon in self-defense. The police are not your friends in such scenarios, warned a local attorney. Also, are you toting a golf club on your walk to ward off trouble? You should rethink that.
Firearms instructor Bryan Ponder stood at ease before about 30 people attending “How to Survive an Active Shooter” this month at High Caliber Gun Range, but a Smith & Wesson 1911 holstered on his hip said he was ready for trouble.
The retired police officer from Cleburne has spent 20 years prepared for danger in the form of a shooter with multiple victims in his sights – a scenario playing out all too often these days.
Just weeks before the June 9 seminar at the local gun range, the slaughter of 10 people at Santa Fe High School May 18 near Houston left Texans reeling. So what to do if tragedy comes calling?
“If you never decide to stand up and say, ‘It’s time to go to work. I will live today.’ Guess what? You won’t. End of story. You just won’t,” Proctor, a military veteran, said.
Going to work involves activating a simple process that will help keep your brain calm, situational awareness up and adrenaline levels lower in spite of the chaotic situations trending up in the United States.
Ponder was preaching to the choir, so to speak. Most audience members raised their hands when he asked who had a Texas License To Carry a Handgun.
And attendees ranging from age from 17 to perhaps 70-something seemed content to while away a Saturday evening inside a classroom. The seminar was sponsored by Texas Law Shield, a company offering firearms legal defense plans.
Ponder, 39, noted the meteoric rise of active shooters in the United States, outlined in “A study of Active Shooters in the United States from 2000 to 2013.”
The FBI eyeballed scenarios in which a gunman strikes down at least five people, tracking 160 such incidents total. In those 13 years, 460 people were mowed down.
Active shooter reports skyrocketed from one in 2000 to 21 in 2012 and, finally, to 17 in 2013.
While school shootings are top of mind, most active shooters – almost 46 percent -- struck in commercial areas. Educational settings come in second at 25 percent.
What’s more, 60 percent of the shootings ended before police arrived.
“Who is it up to, to defend ourselves?” Proctor said to a rapt audience. “Us, and that’s it.”
In explaining what to do in case of a shooting, he debunked an outdated approach: “run, hide, fight.”
Proctor said the federal government dropped run, hide, fight about 15 years ago.
“What happens when you run? Where’s your brain go? It just goes,” Proctor, owner and lead instructor at Arlington-based Go Strapped Firearms Training, said. “Is there any thought process to running?”
A person might end up dashing right toward the shooter, he said.
As for the next option, hide, it’s not a good one.
“Bad guy’s coming to the door,” Proctor said. “You’re going to go into the closet. You’re going to go underneath the chair. That’s our typical, instinctual response.”
Meanwhile, the shooter has the advantage of distance and range provided by a firearm, as well as 100 percent access to the hider, he said. The final possibility, fight, does not involve any brain-engaging strategy.
The new method is avoid, deny, defend, Proctor said. Avoiding is simple: Just go the other way of the shooter and leave if you can.
“If avoid fails, and there’s nowhere else to go, we now have to deny him access to us. I start barricading the door, turn the lights off. I throw something over the window so that he can’t see me,” Proctor said.
“I strap the door shut, literally pull the door shut, literally everything I can do to deny him access to me,” he said. “It’s not just run. There’s a mental process here.”
If denying access fails, come up with a defense strategy, Proctor said.
“I give you mental processes. What does that do to your adrenal level and your thought matrix?” he said. “That allows you to … think and calm down.”
And keep the heart rate down.
Proctor said the average resting heart rate is 60 to 90 beats per minute.
A heart rate of 130 triggers loss of manual dexterity, and major muscle movements deteriorate at 150 beats per minute, he said. At 170, the body begins to shut down.
“By giving you tasks to do, I’ve lowered it down, hopefully we can keep it in that 150 range,” Proctor said.
When an active shooter strikes, possible victims fall into three categories, Proctor said.
There are those who go to work, the freakers and the freezers and, finally, what he calls the “Snap Chatters.”
But there’s really no choice if a person wants to survive, according to Proctor.
“You either hand the keys of your life over to the bad guy with a gun or you keep control of your engine,” he said.
That means launching the basic strategy of avoid, deny, defend. It can materialize in various forms.
For instance, a Junior Reserved Officers Training Corps student in the midst of a shooting in Parkland, Florida, went to work with ballistic blankets, Proctor said.
A gunman killed 17 people Feb. 14 there at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
But Colton Haab saved 60 to 70 students and teachers, herding them to shelter in the ROTC room behind ballistic blankets to hide them and shield them from bullets, according to media reports.
"I didn't think it was going to stop it, but it would definitely slow it down to make it from a catastrophic to a lifesaving thing,” Haab told CNN.
Proctor said everyone has seen freakers and freezers, “the ones that just stand there and scream, and the ones that lay on the ground and freeze.”
He finds the new category, Snap Chatters, impressive, like it or not.
“We all think ‘Oh, there’s that stupid kid holding his phone up recording,’ ” Proctor said.
But consider their mental aptitude, he said.
“They actually have the presence of mind in a life-and-death situation to hold up their phone, record what’s going on, and type a current, whatever’s going on, on the screen of the phone as they’re being shot at,” Proctor said.
That’s someone who could likely transform into a go-to-work initiative taker, he said.