Too many communities have been touched by armed violence. Sandy Hook, Columbine, Virginia Tech, New Life Church—each time such an event happens in another community, it touches us as a Nation and we are reminded that it could happen in our own community.

Mass casualty incidents may occur wherever people congregate—in elementary and secondary schools, on college campuses, in houses of worship, or in other venues. They are part of a complex problem that affects the entire community, and that will require the whole community, working together, to address.

While no measures can ensure absolute security, there are ways we can significantly reduce the risk. Many planned attacks have been averted and countless lives have been saved by being prepared. By sharing our collective insights, expertise, and effort, we can minimize the likelihood that such events will take place and be prepared to act if an incident does occur.

Are you prepared?

This course will help you understand the threats and challenges of mass casualty incidents, and present ways you can improve your level of preparedness should the unthinkable occur.

This course provides leading practices and resources to assist elementary and secondary schools, institutions of higher education, and houses of worship in developing emergency plans for preparing for, responding to, and recovering from mass casualty incidents.

After completing this course, you should be able to identify key considerations and strategies for preparing for mass casualty incidents, including:

• Understanding the threats and challenges.
• Establishing planning processes.
• Assessing and mitigating vulnerabilities.
• Establishing response procedures.
• Planning for recovery.
• Staying prepared.

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To receive credit for this course, you must:

Complete all of the lessons. Each lesson will take between 10 and 70 minutes to complete. It is important to allow enough time to complete the course in its entirety.

A great deal of research has been done on mass casualty incidents at schools, institutions of higher education, and houses of worship. The information in this course summarizes findings, lessons learned, examples, and tips from many different research studies, reports, existing guidelines, and other publications.

After completing this lesson you should be able to identify:

• The threats and challenges associated with mass casualty incidents in schools, institutions of higher education, and houses of worship.
• Lessons learned from past mass casualty incidents.
• The role of the whole community in preventing, protecting, and mitigating against active shooter/mass casualty threats.
• Key factors from incidents where communities were able to prevent an active shooter incident or mitigate mass casualties.

As these examples illustrate, there is no single scenario for mass casualty incidents. Attacks vary in where they happen, who the victims are, how many assailants are involved, what weapons are used, and how they are carried out.

What they do have in common is the shock, the violence, the loss of life, and the terrible impact on the community. These events are the unthinkable.

Various terms are used to describe such incidents—armed assault, armed attack, intrusion, deadly force incident, active shooter, mass casualty incident, and targeted act of violence to name a few.

An active shooter is an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined space or other populated area, most often using firearms and following no pattern or method in the selection of victims.

Incidents of this type invariably receive intense and extended media coverage, giving them a very high profile. However, despite the attention given to isolated instances of extreme violence, the chances of this type of incident occurring in educational facilities and houses of worship is actually quite low, and the odds against such an attack occurring in any particular location are enormous.

Risk: The potential for an unwanted outcome resulting from an incident, event, or occurrence, as determined by its likelihood and the associated consequences.

Threat: A natural or manmade occurrence, individual, entity, or action that has or indicates the potential to harm life, information, operations, the environment, and/or property.

Vulnerability: A physical feature or operational attribute that renders an entity open to exploitation or susceptible to a given hazard.

Elementary-Secondary Schools:

• Relative to the risk of violent victimization that children face outside of school, the risk they face in school is minimal. During the 2009-2010 school year, more than 49 million students were enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade. During this period there were 17 school homicides (less than 2 percent of the total number of youth homicides).
• The U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education identified 37 incidents of targeted school-based attacks, committed by 41 individuals, over the 25-year period from 1974 to 2000.

Institutions of Higher Education:

A study of targeted violence affecting institutions of higher education made the following observations:

• In the 2006-07 school year (the year in which the attack at Virginia Tech occurred), there were 6,563 postsecondary institutions in the United States, with student enrollment of 17.8 million.
• During this period, 0.1 percent of reported campus crimes were murders and non-negligent manslaughter.
• During the period 2000-2008, there were 83 instances of targeted violence.

Houses of Worship:

• A 2010 U.S. religious census reported 344,894 congregations in 236 religious groups with 150,686,156 adherents. According to the Pew Research Center, 39 percent of the population self-reported that they attend a place of worship at least once a week.
• In the past 10 years, there have been more than 600 acts of violence committed in houses of worship.

If the odds of such incidents in any given educational or worship setting are so low, why invest in preparing for them?

The impact of targeted attacks cannot be measured in statistics alone. Schools and places of worship traditionally are places of safety and peace where people can learn and worship without fear of armed violence.

However, violence can happen in any setting, and each attack—no matter how rare—can result in many fatalities. Even one such death will have a tremendous and lasting effect on family and loved ones, the surrounding community, and the Nation as a whole and can generate tremendous stress and anxiety.

Numerous studies have documented and analyzed past incidents to identify contributing factors and strategies that may help in preventing such attacks, mitigating the casualties, effectively responding, and recovering after the event.

Incidents come in many varieties and unfold in different ways. However, according to the findings of the Safe School Initiative, past incidents do share some common characteristics that can help you understand and be ready in the unlikely event that an incident occurs at your site.

This section of the lesson will summarize key lessons from that study. Although the study focused on incidents in schools, the findings can generally be applied to other venues.

There is no single profile or stereotype of the assailants or their motivations. The attackers varied substantially in personality, social characteristics, background, age, home situation, mental health history, prior encounters with law enforcement, and other factors.

Most attackers engaged in some troubling behaviors prior to the incident that caused concern or indicated a need for help. Such behaviors included:

• Research, planning, and preparation (for example, researching how to build a bomb, sketching maps and diagrams, trying to obtain a gun).
• Suicidal threats and attempts.
• Difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures such as death of a loved one, loss of status, job loss, divorce, or academic failure.
• History of being bullied, threatened, harassed, or attacked by others.
• Inappropriate interest in accounts of mass violence, or violent themes in movies, books, video games, or their own writings.

Incidents of targeted violence are rarely impulsive. In almost all incidents, the attacker developed the idea to harm the target before the attack. In many cases, the person formulated the idea for the attack at least 2 weeks in advance and planned out the incident.

Targeted violence is typically the end result of an understandable, often discernible, process of thinking and behavior.

The student responsible for killing at least 30 people at Virginia Tech, had showed signs of disturbing behavior before his attack. He was removed from class for disturbing other students, tutored separately for another class, and encouraged by a faculty member to get counseling. He was accused twice of stalking female students, although charges were not filed. He also made a suicidal statement to his suitemate and was taken to a psychiatric hospital.

On April 16, 2007, the school gunman began his shooting spree by killing two students in a dormitory around 7 a.m. and then continuing his attack in a classroom building around 9:45 a.m. After killing 30 people and injuring numerous others, he ended his attack by shooting himself.

Evidence found in the gunman’s dorm room indicated that he planned the assault well in advance. He purchased his first handgun 5 weeks prior to the attack and then waited the required 30 days before purchasing his second handgun. Also the week before, he may have issued bomb threats against the engineering buildings to test campus security, and sometime in advance he prepared a package of videos, photos, and a rambling document that he mailed to NBC News in New York in between his shootings.

Most attackers didn’t threaten their targets directly before the attack. But prior to most incidents, the attacker told someone—a friend, schoolmate, sibling—and sometimes many people, about the idea or plan before taking action.

In nearly every case of school attacks, the person who was told was a peer and rarely did anything to bring the information to an adult’s attention. In fact, in many cases, friends or fellow students actually encouraged the attacker to act. Select the link below for an example.

The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service researched this dynamic and identified strategies that will increase the chances that people who have information will come forward.

In one incident, for example, the attacker had planned to shoot students in the lobby of his school prior to the beginning of the school day. He told two friends exactly what he had planned and asked three others to meet him that morning in the mezzanine overlooking the lobby, ostensibly so that these students would be out of harm’s way.

On most mornings, usually only a few students would congregate on the mezzanine before the school day began. However, by the time the attacker arrived at school on the morning of the attack, word about what was going to happen had spread to such an extent that 24 students were on the mezzanine waiting for the attack to begin. One student who knew the attack was to occur brought a camera so that he could take pictures of the event.

In past incidents, most attackers had used guns previously and had access to guns. In nearly two-thirds of school incidents, for example, the attackers obtained the weapons from their own home or that of a relative.

Remember, however, that although guns have been the weapon of choice in many incidents, it is unwise to focus only on “active shooter” scenarios. Past assailants have used guns, knives, improvised explosive devices, fire, and other types of weapons, and they have used firearms and explosives in combination. Future attackers could very well expand their methods to include weapons of terror not seen in past incidents.

Two boys ages 11 and 13 gathered weapons in a van and drove to Westside Middle School. Once at school, one boy pulled a fire alarm and then joined his friend outside. As teachers and students evacuated the building, the boys opened fire, killing four students and one teacher and wounding 10 others. The boys then ran into the woods and surrendered when they were challenged by armed police officers.

They were found with 10 to 13 fully loaded firearms, 200 rounds of ammunition, a crossbow, and hunting knives. All of the weapons were owned by one of the boy’s family. The boys were experienced shooters who belonged to gun clubs and participated in shooting competitions.

Both had expressed hostility toward others and threatened something big was going to happen. One had overt disciplinary problems, while the other was described as well-mannered and cheerful, although he had fired his BB gun at children and animals.

The two were convicted as juveniles with the maximum penalty under State law, and then convicted of the Federal crime of bringing a gun to school. They were released from prison in 2005 and 2007.

Most incidents last 20 minutes or less. Even when emergency personnel respond quickly, people already at the scene—staff, faculty, congregants, guards, volunteers, other students—are typically the first to respond. Many times the attack is over before emergency responders arrive.

This fact underscores the need for everyone present to be prepared to act in the safest and most appropriate manner if a situation arises.

Vulnerability: Places where people congregate tend to be vulnerable due to:

• Large numbers of potential victims assembled in a limited space. Especially vulnerable are open areas such as corridors and lunchrooms, playgrounds, sanctuaries, student unions, designated areas for fire drills, bus routes, and the like.
• Predictable times when facilities are in use.
• Difficulty preventing an individual from entering or intervening before injuries occur. For example, a metal detector may simply shift the point of attack to an area outside of the venue and may not deter a person bent on harming people.

No crystal ball: Unfortunately there is no easy formula or “profile” of risk factors that accurately determines the next attacker or incident. Profiles are not specific enough to discern who may pose a threat, and they may unfairly stigmatize those who fit some preconceived stereotype. Focusing on stereotypes can also be very misleading: school and campus shooters aren’t always students, and attackers at a place of worship may be a member or a stranger.

Competing objectives: Educational and faith-based institutions typically need to balance security against seemingly conflicting objectives, such as:

• Maintaining an open and accessible environment that is conducive to learning and interaction.
• Providing a place of peace and sanctuary where everyone is welcome.

“It can’t happen here” mindset: The infrequency of targeted attacks can lead to a sense of security and complacency—an attitude that violence is something that happens only to other people. This perspective sometimes results in resistance to taking preventive measures and reluctance to spend scarce resources on security.

Impact on the community at large: When acts of violence hurt the most vulnerable among us, the impact extends well beyond the walls of the place it occurs. The shock and grief caused by such incidents cause widespread emotional damage and create fear throughout the community. The challenges related to emotional recovery extend to all parts of the community.

Soft targets – Schools are inherently soft targets and vulnerable because of many potential targets being concentrated in a limited space. Students are not always in classrooms. Lunchrooms, corridors, outdoor areas, and buses may be difficult to secure.

Rural schools – Many are located in small, isolated towns served by only State police or sheriff’s departments. The far-flung patrol responsibilities and limited staff levels of those agencies may result in lengthy response times, and a longer wait for police response extends the period of vulnerability.

Vulnerability of information systems – Information in the first few moments may be scant, fragmentary, and sometimes ambiguous. If administrative personnel (whose offices are often near the main entrance) are killed or driven to take cover, no one may be able to initiate a formal alert, forcing teachers and other staff to make autonomous decisions for the protection of their charges.

Young populations – Young students (especially prekindergarten to grade 3 ) cannot be counted on to react the same as older students. Young children may not understand instructions. For example, they may not understand the importance of hiding and keeping quiet, or may even hide from responders. The hazard to them and to their teachers is correspondingly greater. This is an especially important consideration for any protocols that involve teaching children to evacuate during an incident.

Students with access and functional needs – Consideration needs to be given to students with access and functional needs before, during, and after an incident.

Ineffective approaches to access control – Many organizations have implemented good access control technologies only to have them compromised by ineffective usage. One example is purchasing a high quality visitor management system that allows for rapid screening of visitors and then placing the units in a manner where visitors sign themselves in. This usage relies on the integrity of the visitor to maintain security.

Employee and student turnover – Many school systems have turnover rates of up to 25% annually for teaching and support staff. In addition, many schools serve constantly rotating student populations. High rates of turnover can make it more difficult to identify warning behaviors and to keep personnel informed of security protocols.

Geographical spread – Colleges often cover large geographic areas, may be geographically integrated in the surrounding community, and sometimes even resemble small towns with the full extent of services in their vicinity (i.e., medical centers, sports complexes, residential centers, businesses). This sprawl complicates security.

Access – Most colleges have open access. Moreover, the population on a campus is so diverse that recognizing an “intruder” can be nearly impossible.

Dispersed population – Autonomy is encouraged and fostered for both students and faculty. At any one time, students, faculty, and staff are dispersed around the campus in classrooms, common areas, cafeterias, offices, dormitories, and numerous other facilities. This arrangement is not conducive to observing and recognizing behavioral concerns among the student population.

Lack of regular contact – The campus population changes from day to day, semester to semester, and year to year. Irregular student schedules minimize regular contact between educators and students, which again makes it more difficult to recognize problem behaviors.

Large numbers of international students – Students who speak English as a second language may find t harder to pick up critical instructions if they are not communicated with great clarity. In addition, many countries do not conduct emergency drills, so students from these countries may be unfamiliar with them.

Schedules – College campuses do not operate under typical business-hour schedules. They are alive and engaged with activity almost around the clock, which magnifies security challenges.

Stressors – Many colleges have residential facilities where students live. The combined educational and residential environment may cause or exacerbate stressors in a student’s life and provide triggers for an act of violence by troubled students.

Soft targets – Many religious leaders are not aware of vulnerabilities and basic crime prevention methods. Consequently, many places of worship are soft targets.

Ideology – By nature houses of worship are open to outsiders and seek to welcome strangers. They may view security measures as inconsistent with this image or fear that they will somehow scare people away. There is a need to balance having a security presence while still keeping the facility open to everyone.

Turnover – Places of worship frequently have a steady turnover of new faces. This, combined with the desire to be welcoming, can make it difficult to identify individuals who are out of place.

Predictable schedules – Houses of worship have predictable hours when people are arriving for worship and then are amassed in a confined area. Some congregations are extremely large (“megachurches” may have as many as 2,000 worshippers a week), providing large numbers of potential targets in one place.

Flexible access – When people gather for worship, things are rarely as organized as they might be in some other meetings. People arrive early and late, in groups and alone. Members and guests may roam around the lobby or wander down halls. The lobby may be packed with people of all ages. If there is more than one service, some people will arrive as others are leaving.

Open events – Places of worship have many events—weddings, receptions, funerals, picnics, community fairs, bazaars, food pantries, self-help group meetings, church camps, and the like—to which nonmembers are invited. These events may be wholly or partly outside and therefore more difficult to secure.

You can’t do it alone. Violence is a problem that impacts the entire community, and creating solutions is a joint responsibility involving the whole community. Everyone has an important role to play, including:

• Students and their households.
• School officials, faculty, counselors, staff, and volunteers.
• Religious leaders and congregants.
• Law enforcement, fire service, local emergency managers, and other emergency personnel.
• Judges, mental health professionals, social services, and a variety of other youth-serving professionals.
• Members of the academic and business communities who have expertise to share.

Preparedness and planning are the key to making your environment safer. Working together with your community partners will enable you to create a plan that considers:

• Measures you can take before an incident to assess and mitigate vulnerabilities.
• Procedures you can use during an incident to minimize casualties and help bring the situation under control.
• Actions you can take after an incident to promote community recovery.
• What you can do to stay prepared.
• In later lessons you will learn more about the planning process and ways to prepare in each of these areas.

Below are online resources where you can learn more:

U.S. Secret Service Safe School Initiative

U.S. Department of Education, Emergency Planning, Office of Safe and Healthy Students

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative

FBI: Campus Attacks: Targeted Violence Affecting Institutions of Higher Education

U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Guide for Preventing and Responding to School Violence

You should now be able to identify:

• The threats and challenges associated with mass casualty incidents in schools, institutions of higher education, and houses of worship.
• Lessons learned from past mass casualty incidents.
• The role of the whole community in preventing, protecting, and mitigating against active shooter/mass casualty threats.
• Key factors from incidents where communities were able to prevent an active shooter incident or mitigate mass casualties.