PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. – As a journalist who began his career in the 90s, I’ve reported on my fair share of tragedies involving gun violence. Everything from the drug deal that turned into a deadly robbery, and drive-by-shootings between gangs to terror attacks and ... mass shootings.
When it comes to the mass killing of innocent children at school, I’m always questioning why it happened. Could it have been prevented? Did responding law enforcement do enough to save as many kids as possible?
Back on Sept. 4, just one month into a new school year for students at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, another mass shooting made national news. This time, a 14-year-old was taken into custody after police say he wounded nine people and killed two students and two teachers.
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Following that tragedy, I wanted to know what exactly happens when police respond to school shootings. To answer that question, I was granted permission to join Putnam County Sheriff’s Office deputies at their active shooter training building, which was formally a middle school.
Before my arrival, I was already forewarned that the school shooter response training I was about to participate in involved the use of real guns that had been modified to shoot ammo that looked like real bullets, but the projectiles sting on impact and splatter paint. So, I was fitted with a protective head, face, and bodywear.
The students were actors, and the bad guys were deputies pretending to be school shooters.
Into the battlefield
In my first scenario, I was tasked with responding to a classroom where students were being held hostage by a suicidal gunman. I entered the building, but instead of going straight to the room where I could hear students screaming for help and the gunman yelling, I started to do a security sweep in the adjacent classrooms.
I was looking for a second gunman who I thought would flank me from behind if I went straight to the room where the hostages were. I eventually made my way to the hostages where I found them all on their knees while the gunman was holding a gun to his head. I told him several times to put the gun down as he said he would shoot himself. Then he lowered the gun and said he would kill one of the students. That’s when I shot him multiple times.
Following that scenario, my instructor, Deputy Nick Coin explained where I went wrong, even though I stopped the gunman and none of the hostages were harmed.
He said my first mistake was being too slow because I failed to go straight to the classroom where students were screaming for help. According to Coin, when a law enforcement officer is responding to a school shooting, every second that goes by another student is fatally shot.
Also, despite having a clear shot at the gunman the moment I opened the door, I made the mistake of waiting for the gunman to point his gun at a student before I shot the gunman.
“I might ask him to drop it once or twice. Depending on where I’m at in the structure and a lot of different elements, but then I have no choice but to shoot him,” Coin said.
So, in that scenario, I had the right to shoot the second I opened the door because he had already proven himself to be an imminent threat to the student hostages.
In my second scenario, I quickly pulled up to the school in a patrol vehicle after learning a man armed with an AR-style rifle was firing his gun inside a classroom filled with students.
Moments after I entered the building and quickly but cautionary started walking down a hallway, multiple students ran out of a classroom toward me. They were yelling. The gunman was behind them at the door and started shooting in my direction.
This was a scenario where I could not shoot back because the students would have been in my line of fire. I ran up to the doorway to engage the shooter in the classroom, but I was not fast enough. He had already shot and killed one student in the room.
The two of us engaged in a brief gunbattle until I ran out of bullets and needed to reload as I took cover. After reloading, there were a few seconds of silence until my instructor yelled, “Kids in the classroom are dying.”
I inched closer to the doorway and unloaded an entire magazine into the suspect. In this scenario, the suspect was considered neutralized or deceased. My instructor then debriefed my actions based on his observation.
“Good job for not shooting the kids. Typically, when people are amped up, they might shoot an innocent bystander. Good job not shooting the other deputy who showed up to help you. Did you realize he was a deputy?” he asked.
“I didn’t realize there was another deputy here,” I said.
“Fair enough, so we can get tunnel vision. There are things we can do to break tunnel vision. Good job not getting sucked into another classroom and getting confused. You knew where you needed to go. I would just say pick up a little bit faster,” Coin said.
My third and final scenario was a school shooting massacre in progress. I arrived on campus where there was a trail of dead students leading me to a building where I could hear shots being fired and more students being killed. As I walked down a dark hallway, stepping over bodies, I could hear Deputy Coin telling me to pick up the pace,
“Kids are dying. Get in there,” Coin said. I found myself at another doorway to a classroom where I killed the shooter by dumping an entire magazine of bullets into his body. But, as I proceeded to enter the room, I was shot at. In this scenario, there were two shooters. The second shooter was armed with a handgun and a rifle.
After reloading behind the wall next to the doorway, I had an idea of where the second gunman was standing so I extended my hand through the doorway and blindly shot the second suspect. Unlike the first suspect who was killed, the second suspect was only wounded and was taken into custody.
Response Feedback
Following those intense training scenarios, I sat down with Col. David Blount of the PCSO. He’s a veteran law enforcement officer who monitored my training.
“I would say you did very well. I think there was a lot of hesitation at the door like what we talked about, but that’s natural. The door is covered. There is a concrete wall offering you protection. It takes training, training, and training to force yourself through that door but overall, you engaged the threat. You didn’t retreat. You went through and a lot of people won’t go through that door. We’ve seen that,” Blount said.
Anytime there is a video from a school shooting, the PCSO will try and obtain a copy of that video for educational purposes.
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Recent examples are videos from the school shooting massacres in Parkland, and Uvalde, Texas.
“What they did wrong, we can train on to hopefully get it right when we experience a school shooting response,” Blount said.
At some point, parents may see recorded video footage of an officer appearing to delay his or her engagement with the shooter. And it may cause a parent to criticize that officer’s actions. But after going through the realistic training, I can say it’s an intense situation of making split-second decisions while engaging an active shooter.
“As you saw, going through and standing in the doorway knowing that inside that doorway is a shooter and we tell our deputies every day that we’re there to protect the kids. We are going to set our lives aside to get in there. You do everything you can to tactically make that approach so you can engage the suspect and save children, but at the end of the day, we’re going in that room and there is a high likelihood that we’re going to take around or two,” Blount said.
When it comes to engaging a school shooter, Blount encourages kids to fight back if they find themselves in a situation where a gunman has entered their classroom. He says there is power in numbers and maybe enough pushback can give kids a fighting chance to survive until police arrive.
“For me as a parent, I taught my kids never to stop fighting. They won’t be in the room and cower behind a chair. They’re going to use this chair to throw at a person. They’re going to go down fighting,” Blount said.
In recent weeks, the PCSO along with other law enforcement across the state have arrested many children who have been accused of making a written or verbal threat to commit a deadly shooting at school.
“Those students can be released in one hour, one day, or 21 days. We still have to do the steps that prepare us for that student coming back later. Just because we arrested them today, doesn’t mean they can’t come back and still try to follow through with their threat,” Blount said.
When it comes to online threats, Blount encourages kids and parents to not share threatening posts with other kids and parents through social media groups because if the posted threat has not been vetted by law enforcement, it can lead to unnecessary panic.
“When these things are shared throughout their groups, it gets bigger, bigger, and bigger. Kids share it in their group, and then that group shares it with another group, spreading it across the state. Panic was everywhere with multiple schools involved,” Blount said. “The other day we had one where we had to call four different schools that had the same acronym for a high school because we didn’t originally know where the threat came from. That’s because it was being shared through different social media groups, so I will ask parents to educate their kids by saying if they get that, don’t just delete it. Please bring it to their parent, a teacher, or a law enforcement officer. Let us investigate the threat before it’s shared.”
After a school shooter has been killed by police or taken into custody, parents should never just show up at the scene and pressure law enforcement for information on what happened. Doing so only slows down the process of reuniting the kids with their parents. Instead, parents will need to go to a designated location advertised via social media or news reports of where kids are to be picked up.
The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 put school mass shootings on a national map. According to data collected from the K-12 shooting database, the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at Naval Postgraduate School, and the Violence Project Mass Shooter database, from 1999 to 2023, there have been:
- 73 High school shootings
- 17 Elementary school shootings
- 7 University shootings
- 8 K-12 or other school shootings
- 26 Middle school or 6th through 12th grade school shootings
During that same timeline, there were 222 fatalities and 351 injuries.
So far in 2024, there have been 144 reported shooting incidents at K-12 schools.