BOOK REVIEW: Surviving a Mass Killer Rampage: When Seconds Count, Police are Still Minutes Away

Surviving a Mass Killer Rampage: When Seconds Count, Police are Still Minutes Away, by Chris Bird (Privateer Publications, 2016, 408 pages).

(Ammoland.com) Any reasonably informed American can tell you who Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were.

Their names are indelibly linked with the name “Columbine” as the vile mass murderers of 13 people in the April 1999 incident of that name. But few know of Joel Myrick, Tracy Bridges or Joe Zamudio, three armed citizen heroes who ran to, not from, the gunfire of mass murderers.

The near-instantaneous defensive response made possible by arming potential victims, which is to say the public, is something that doesn’t happen in the gun prohibitionist’s make-believe world.

So it’s fortunate that we have Chris Bird detailing through a crime reporter’s eye just how it did happen in one mass killing after another. Bird fills in the details deliberately omitted in mainstream media reports: the life-saving actions of Myrick (Pearl, Mississippi school shooting, 1997), Bridges (Appalachian School of Law shooting, 2002), Zamudio (Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Tucson shooting, 2011), and many others.

The lessons have not been lost on law enforcement and education agencies, which have adopted remedies ranging from the ground-up Argyle School District armed staff program in rural north Texas to Ohio’s FASTER (Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response) course.

FASTER training of school staff is a collaboration between the private shooting school Tactical Defense Institute and Ohio gun rights group the Buckeye Firearms Foundation. As in the Argyle School District, school boards and administrators provide the local impetus to improve school security. FASTER training covers the well-known intense physical and mental stresses of life-threatening encounters. Psychiatrist Dr. Robert Young, DRGO’s chief editor, provides expert commentary for Bird on the effects of stress on recall of the crucial details of a shooting.

Bird actually participated in the FASTER course and ALICE training, another on-site response framework run by a former Texas SWAT officer and a businessman collaborator in Cleveland. ALICE is the acronym for “Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate.”

A central theme of Bird’s is the organic origins of both the FASTER and ALICE programs. They were conceived by former law enforcement officers as a response to mass shootings (or killings, as Bird generically couches the term), and not by government bureaucrats. Columbine and Sandy Hook did reorder bureaucratic thinking about response strategies, but real-world change was brought about by local experts—the likes of the FASTER and ALICE creators, local school boards, and the Buckeye Firearms Foundation.

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