Ready for “real threat”
Inside a nondescript, brown building surrounded by businesses in Centennial, gunfire rings out and punches are thrown as a former Navy SEAL coaches everyday office workers and soccer moms to fend o≠ attacks. ¶ “Hit! Hit! Hit!” Jimmy Graham calls in cadence. “Hands nice and high. Good. Relax.”
The students step back as their punching dummies sway on their bases.
Graham is the director of the Centennial Gun Club’s new Active Shooter Response Training Center, where the mission is to teach people to respond to gunmen, terrorists and other workplace violence. The center is marketing itself to businesses, schools and churches, said Dick Abramson, the gun club’s general manager.
Human resource and risk management experts express concern about such training, saying it is a bad idea to ask employees to serve as an in-house security force.
“This is a slippery slope that employers should not go down,” said Margaret Spence, a Florida-based human resources and risk management consultant and member of the Society for Human Resource Management’s panel on workplace violence.
In the past year, high-profile work-
place shootings have made headlines. Besides the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre — where a husband and wife killed 14 people and injured 22 during a rampage at an office party — other workplace killings include the Planned Parenthood shooting in November in Colorado Springs and a February attack at a Kansas lawn mower plant where a co-worker killed four people and wounded 14.
“We’ve started getting calls from people who said if this happens in my business, I have no idea what to,” he said. “After San Bernardino, it really started to ramp up.”
Most businesses are not adequately prepared to protect their employees, and most shootings end before police arrive, Abramson and Graham said.
They believe their close quarters defense system, used by SEALs, is the answer.
Hundreds of people are killed by gunfire at work each year, but the number of people shot to death at work has declined in the most recent data available.
In 2014, there were 4,679 workplace deaths, and of those 403 people — 9 percent — were killed by another person. Of those, 307 were killed by gunshots, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of the 4,585 workplace fatalities in 2013, 404 were homicides with 322 people being shot, the BLS reported.
While people are far more likely to be killed on the job in a traffic accident, workplace shootings weigh on people’s minds. How many office workers in recent months have had a conversation, even jokingly, about where they would run if someone came in the door with a gun?
Among the Centennial training center offerings are a week-long course and quarterly refresher training for companies. It is not cheap. The center charges $450 per person per day, Abramson said.
“It’s a significant investment, but it’s not training you can get anywhere else,” he said.
But Spence says companies risk losing their liability insurance when they are forced to admit employees are armed. They also open themselves to worker’s compensation claims should one of the armed employees accidentally shoot himself or a co-worker, she said.
A company also would have to be careful in deciding whom to arm because it could set itself up for discrimination claims made by workers who were not asked to be a part of a security team.
Then there are questions about how to rewrite policies that ban guns in a workplace, how to discipline people who decided to arm themselves without permission, and how to address concerns from employees who are uncomfortable around guns, said Spence whose Colorado clients include four hospitals, two processing plants and about 150 farms.
Spence she would not recommend the training to her clients.
“An employer’s response should be, ‘If I feel I need security, I go out and get security and pay for it,’ ” she said.
Robin Kane, an associate professor at the University of Denver’s MBA program, said it is important to train employees on how to react to workplace violence. But arming other employees is over the line, she said.
Besides the liability, Kane said, most companies would not want the image of its employees carrying guns, especially in Colorado, which is increasingly attracting millennials.
“It’s a mismatch with who we are as far as the generations we attract,” she said.
When asked about the insurance costs and workplace policies banning guns, Graham said he believes things will change in the United States.
At some point, companies will be held liable for not doing enough to protect their employees, he said.
“We’re just saying that people have a right to defend their lives,” he said. “We want to let people know we are here as a resource if these things happen.”
Chris Grollnek, a nationally recognized active-shooter expert who trains corporations, governments and schools through his company CGPGMG, said he has been following the Centennial Active Shooter Response Training Center’s development.
It’s a good idea for people who want to learn the tactics, but not everyone is a Navy SEAL, he said.
Grollneck prefers teaching people to run, not hide. And he doesn’t advocate that everyone take up arms.
“I’m not promoting more shooting,” he said. “I’m trying to prevent it.”
The Centennial Active Shooter Response Training Center will teach people to try to de-escalate situations, Graham said. And for some people, running would be the best reaction.
A lot of the training, such as the hand-to-hand combat, is aimed at giving people a chance to knock back an attacker and escape, Graham said.
And there will be times when a person with a gun is the answer.
“People put a little too much trust in video cameras and a little too much trust in locked doors,” Graham said. “What’s worked throughout history is a person willing to step forward and take a stand.”
Graham and Abramson said they are offering to help people prepare for a real threat. They recognize critics will say they are peddling fear.
“Of course, there are going to be people who feel that way,” Abramson said. “There probably were people in that building in San Bernardino who felt the same way. It’s not spreading fear. It’s just being prepared.”