The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Police host active shooter training
Area residents learned strategies April 7 for responding to active shooter situations and developing a safety plan.
The Lorain County Sheriff’s Office hosted an active shooter seminar at First Baptist Church of Elyria at 11400 LaGrange Road.
“Unfortunately in today’s world this is what we’re dealing with now,” said Sheriff Phil Stammitti. “You hear about these things on the news and you read them in the paper, everybody always thinks it’s the other guy.
“You are the other guy. It’s not always that this happens to somebody else. It can happen anywhere. There are church shootings going on throughout the world. There are school shootings going on everywhere. It’s a sad state of affairs.”
The training was the second event of the year following a seminar at Church of the Open Door in collaboration with the Sheriff’s Department and retired FBI agent Jim Larkin.
Tester said the Sheriff’s Office has been conducting active shooter training seminars in the area for the last ten years, working with schools, libraries and churches in helping organizations develop safety plans in the event of a shooting through active training scenarios.
In law enforcement for 24 years, Tester is the Tactical Team Leader of the Lorain County SWAT team. He stressed between 20002016 with 160 active shooters law enforcement were
only able to stop 1.3 percent of shootings, alluding to the need for people to be prepared both mentally and physically.
“We weren’t stopping them. It was citizens stopping them. It was them committing suicide or them just running off and fleeing and getting them later,” Tester said.
After initiating a solo engagement strategy emphasizing rapid response in 2014, law enforcement was able to stop 26 out of 40 active shooter incidents for a 65 percent success rate.
In working with schools, he described in numerous mass shootings such as Columbine, Pulse Nightclub and others, the lack of preparation and safety planning and strategy contributed to casualties. Working with students and teachers changes the scenario in a negative way for a shooter.
“They have a fantasy in their head and they know they have a timeline. They know that hour glass the minute they hit that door. They know they only have seven to 12 minutes. They have this building in their plan and they know what it’s going to take to get into those areas,” Tester added.
Larkin, a veteran of the Vietnam War, discussed the mental and physical response the body experiences when caught in an active shooting situation. He described how mental exertion and adrenaline can decrease reaction time in a crisis and demonstrated strategies to lower heart rate through tactical breathing in order to train your brain how to respond effectively.