When I heard that Provincetown was hosting an “active shooter attack prevention and preparedness” training session, my initial reaction was skepticism. The town’s press release said, “This crucial training event is designed to equip our community with the knowledge and skills necessary to respond effectively to an active shooter situation.” Bold language, I thought.
I also thought of Jamie Thompson’s article “To Stop a Shooter” in the March 2024 Atlantic, which lays out the case of Broward County sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson, the “Coward of Broward,” who was arrested and tried for failing to charge into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and single-handedly confront a madman with an AR-15-style rifle who killed 17 people on Valentine’s Day 2018.
It’s well known among those who study mass shootings, Thompson wrote, that most active shooter response training is ineffective. It’s unrealistic to expect officers without highly specialized skills and extensive psychological training to act heroically when suddenly faced with high risk of death. Some shoot wildly, endangering innocent people, while many others simply freeze.
Referring to Deputy Peterson and the officers who stood around while children were being murdered in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, Judith Andersen, a policing scholar at the University of Toronto, told Thompson, “You can talk about them, judge them, armchair-quarterback them all you want,” but “the average cop is not all that different from the average citizen.”
I worried, too, that the event would ramp up people’s fears unnecessarily. But when I mentioned my doubts at an editorial meeting, I learned that the fear is already here, rooted in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando eight years ago and heightened by recent warnings from the FBI and the State Dept. of threats against the gay community during Pride month. The threats have come from “foreign terrorist organizations,” the New York Times reported, encouraging “followers to conduct attacks on ‘soft targets,’ typically public places or events that are easily accessible.” The danger is “compounded by the current heightened threat environment in the United States and other Western countries,” the FBI said.
The preparedness session was held on Monday at town hall, and 160 people came, as Paul Benson reports this week — further evidence that the potential for violence is on many minds. The “run, hide, fight methodology” recommended by the FBI’s presenter — the latest version of the correct response to a killer with an automatic weapon — might conceivably save one’s life, although active-shooter training, Benson told me when we talked afterward, “feels a lot like earthquake training: it’s either not going to happen or it’s probably going to kill you.”
There was, of course, no discussion of gun control at Monday’s session, and there appears to be little appetite for it in Congress, where the strategy is simply “run, hide.” Yet the experience of Australia in reducing gun deaths and mass murder through stricter controls and the principle that gun ownership is a privilege, not a right, offers some glimmer of light as we celebrate Pride and think about the unthinkable.
