By Jake G. Bennett Co-Founder and CEO of S.W.T.C

With the El Paso, Texas shooting on Saturday, August 3, which left 20 and dead and more than two

dozen injured being followed just 13 hrs. later with another shooting in Dayton, Ohio early Sunday,

August 4, 2019, that killed at least 9 more with 26 injured it is clear we have an issue that can’t be

denied.

Ohio marked the 251 st shooting of 2019, while only 8 months into the year we are quickly closing in on the 307 shootings of 2018 according to gunviolence.org. Not only are incidents becoming more and more common, death and injury tolls are increasing as SWTC has predicted with shooters being increasingly premeditated, well planned, and better practiced with firearms than seen in years past.

The increasing number of shootings and the evolving profile of an active shooter make it more apparent now than ever than the current model of Active Shooter Training is inadequate. Businesses often hand out or host a powerpoint that simply regurgitates “Run, Hide, Fight” without any real strategy or training. Employees, people, need to have training to fall back on just as those in Military, Police,

and Fire do. Training so that when not is, a situation occurs they know what to do rather than to dissolve into panic.

Not only businesses but the individual themselves need to start thinking about how to respond to these situations. El Paso occurred in a Walmart, Dayton occurred in a nightclub, last week’s shooting in

Gilroy, CA was at a garlic festival. Targets where people are in high numbers, where their situational awareness is neglected and guards down. With response times taking as much as 6 minutes as seen in El Paso, you cannot rely solely on police to protect you in these sort of situations. It is time for individuals to start practicing the kind of situational awareness needed to recognize a situation as early as possible, to think and practice the skills needed to survive and escape just as one thinks and practices learning CPR or what to do in the event of a fire.

These are horrendous acts of violence and cowardice, but they are here to stay for the foreseeable future. You must, as a business, as a manager, and as an individual plan for them and try to mitigate losses as best you can.



