John Nicoletti, an expert in workplace and school violence based in Lakewood, Colo. "He knows 'people are coming for me, they're going to stop me, and I have to do as much damage as I can as quickly as I can.' "Īnother resource the FBI has looked to is research on mass casualties from Dr. "The shooter knows that he's on the clock," Blair. Blair says even the lone officer on the scene needs to intervene in an attack, emphasizing that body counts can rise in an active shooting event with every passing second. The training, which focuses on rapid response techniques, includes lifelike scenarios where officers enter scenes with mass casualties and have to neutralize the shooter as fast as possible.īlair said in past events, such as the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, police would remain outside a building until a trained SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team arrived on the scene. Prior to Newtown, Blair and Texas State had already created a training academy for police officers responding to an active shooting event. "Workplaces are the most commonly attacked places," he said. "Most of these are the much smaller events that end, fortunately, before a lot of people are killed," Blair said. Blair attributes much of the rise to events that might escape attention from other researchers. But from 2009 to the present the number rose to an average of 15 per year. Peter Blair is an associate professor of criminal justice at Texas State and has been evaluating active shooter data that show an average of 5 incidents per year from 2000 to 2008. The FBI's new team does not yet keep its own statistics on active shootings but has turned to information collected by outside researchers, most notably those at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. "The characteristics that bind them together unfortunately is (the) shooter's desire to kill," said Special Agent Schweit, and to kill "as many people and kill them as fast and freely as he may be able to," she said in an exclusive interview with Scripps. Four of those incidents resulted in shootings but no fatalities. The Scripps review of the active shooter data found a total of 14 attacks this year, with gunmen shooting 73 people and killing 39. In September, a gunman killed 12 people inside a heavily secured building at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard. This year, recent high-profile active shooting incidents include an attack at Los Angeles International Airport where a gunman killed a Transportation Security Administration officer and wounded two other agents. In Lake Butler, Fla., this past August, a former trucking company employee drove around the city on a Saturday morning and shot two former co-workers and his onetime boss, killing two before arriving home, where he shot himself. At Inskip Elementary School in Knoxville, Tenn., a school employee opened fire on administrators in 2010. In Tulsa, Okla., in 2012, two gunmen drove around town opening fire at random African-Americans, killing three people. The data reveals that active shooters target places large and small, with most incidents going largely unnoticed outside of the immediate community.
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