GEMA official preps locals in case of active shooter
DBell@CalhounTimes.com
In an active shooter-type situation, you have three options — avoid, deny or defend — and you may have to engage all three tactics, to survive.
This was the message from Georgia Emergency Management Agency Field Coordinator Tim Reeve on Thursday when he spoke to members of the Gordon County Local Emergency Planning Committee and others.
Reeve spoke for about two hours, sharing personal stories, statistics, advice and real life examples, but ultimately, he said, it comes down to those three options. To avoid would be to leave the scene as quickly as possible; to deny would mean locking yourself in somewhere and preventing the attacker from reaching you; and to defend would mean identifying items that could be used as weapons and using force to protect yourself.
GEMA,
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While the majority of people will never find themselves in such a situation, thinking about how you might react and what you could do if it did happen could be the difference between life and death, Reeve said.
“When you look at the statistics, the likelyhood of you ever being in an active shooting event is very low. The problem with that is the consequences of such an event are very high,” he said.
Reeve noted that just this month there have been 10
such events in the United States, including as recently as Tuesday in New Jersey. In 2016 and 2017, there were 50 such attacks. And between 2000 and 2016 there were 661 deaths and 825 injuries as a result of 220 mass causality attacks in the U.S.
In a high stress situation Reeve said everyone goes through three steps: denial, deliberation and decisive moment. The first step represents a disbelief concerning what is happening; the second is when you’ve accepted what is happening and you consider how to react; and the final step is when you take action. The goal, he said, is to quickly accept the reality
of the situation, decide what to do, and then do it.
“The quicker we get through those three steps the more likely we are to survive,” Reeve said.
He noted that getting through those steps can be difficult, even for trained professionals, because the human body has physiological and psychological responses that are automatically triggered in high stress situations, including rapid breathing, an increased heart rate, altered cognitive abilities, tunnel vision and even time dilation, among others.
In such an event, Reeve recommends one engage in what he called tactical breathing, during which you
take four seconds to breathe in through the nose, hold the breath for four seconds, and then exhale through the mouth for four seconds. The slower, intentional breathing can help you calm down, which in turn helps to keep your mind working and improves your ability to react quickly and effectively.
Reeve said the best thing to do in any potential situation is to try and skip the denial stage and go straight to deliberation. If you hear gunshots, don’t assume it’s fireworks or something else. It would be better, he said, to overreact to a false alarm than to underreact to the real thing.