Active shooter training: ‘You all are the real first responders’
Rachel Basinger
Don Witt, explains to the crowd the best way to take down an active shooter.
Rachel Basinger
Participants in the active shooter training held at the Carnegie Library in Connellsville watch a few videos on preparedness.
Bob Renzi goes over the purpose of the active shooter training.
“One of the sickest things I’ll say to you tonight is, we may not stop the killing, but we may be able to reduce the body count.”
These words came from Don Witt, as he and Bob Renzi conducted an active shooter training program at the Carnegie Library in Connellsville for about 50 people.
“You all are the real first responders,” said Renzi, who started going through active shooter training in 1999 after the school shooting in Columbine. Witt was in his first class.
Since then, they have been putting on active shooter programs across the area, including 20 different school districts from fourth-grade and up, churches and other organizations.
The men said one of the biggest hazards — because it leads to a lack of preparation — is the mindset that a mass shooting couldn’t happen here.
“People deny that anything could ever happen,” Renzi said. “But the first active shooter event that I ever heard of was in the 1980s at Anchor Hocking (in South Connellsville). If you think it will never happen here, it already has.
“All you have to do is read the paper and see what happens on a weekly basis,” he added. “Make up your mind that you’re not going to die today and do something.”
Their training was centered around three steps: avoid, deny and defend.
“That’s the basic concept but I like the words run, hide and fight better,” said Witt.
Renzi added that he doesn’t like the word defend.
“Defend means they do something and then you do something in return,” he said. “It should be self-offense — attack the attacker.”
The average time for police to respond to a call is usually between 2 and 6 minutes, depending on the location, the men said.
If an attacker can fire one shot per second, they are able to get off at least 180 shots in just 3 minutes.
“Horrific things can happen in 2 minutes,” Witt said. “You have to do something right now.”
The training focused on how best to attack the attacker to keep as many as possible from becoming targets.
In order to train everyone, it’s easier to start with the kids, Renzi said. “We have to empower little kids along with adults. They can’t fight an adult, but we teach them that they’re harder to hit when they’re up flying around the room yelling and screaming.”
“Just like a bee, they’re little but they can still sting,” Witt said. “If enough fourth-graders work together, they can sting. We teach them to keep moving.”
The goal is to distract the shooter, swarm the shooter, attack the shooter and stop them through injury or death.
“Whether you have any kind of fighting training or not, if you have intent, you can do something,” Renzi said.
The first way individuals could attack is to physically incapacitate a shooter. Two individuals can lock onto the individual below the knee while two others push the shooter over.
Once the shooter is down, at least one individual each should lay across each arm and each leg of the shooter with their torsos/bellybuttons and finally right on the shooters chest/stomach.
“Use your belly button as your sandbag — one on each arm and leg and across the belly,” Witt said. “If he can’t breathe, he can’t fight. It’s going to be chaos, but it needs to be controlled chaos.”
Another tactic is to throw things at the shooter. No matter how great of a shot they are, if something comes flying at them, their natural reaction will be to duck or move.
“This guy should be wrapped up in belts, scarves, masking tape — whatever you have — when the police get there,” Renzi said.
“There aren’t many incidents I know of where police have been able to stop or prevent the incident from happening.”
Witt said he got the idea to hold the community training after the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
“If you get just one ‘aha’ moment tonight — if there’s one ‘I never thought of that’ moment — then this (training) was worth it,” Witt said.