Six Shooting Scenarios: Schools Need More Than One 'Active Shooter' Plan
Middle school kids in Georgia were unnecessarily traumatized after a classmate's suicide resulted in a 'code red lockdown' with frightened parents waiting outside for hours.
Most schools have an 'active shooter' plan and lockdown procedures. But how many have a student suicide plan?
On Wednesday, Lindley Middle School (GA) was placed on lockdown during afternoon classes when an 8th grade student shot herself inside a bathroom. Another 8th grade student at Lindley Middle recounted the terrifying moments during the lockdown as she huddled with classmates inside the locker room. “Next thing you know, the code red alarm goes off, but it turned out it was much worse than we thought. I was thinking was I ever going to see my family again?”
This 8th grade girl’s fear of being murdered by an active shooter was created by a lack of planning and training at the school. When a student commits suicide in a bathroom, no one else is in danger and a ‘code red’ lockdown is a choice that traumatizes everyone on campus.
If a student shoots themselves in a bathroom and the weapon is ‘secured’ by an adult within 60 seconds, this means that school staff and police officers immediately knew they were dealing with a suicide in a bathroom, not an active shooter. At this point, the 'code red' can be cancelled (or not called at all). Instead of dozens of police searching every room of the building while kids think they are about to die, staff can instead focus on keeping students away from the immediate area of the shooting and reducing emotional distress. A classmate committing suicide on campus is already stressful enough without a lockdown!
Suicides on campus are a more common problem than many people realize. On average, there are 4 suicides with firearms each year back to the 1970s. The most common location is a bathroom inside the school while class is in session. Public suicides have also taken place in the school cafeteria, auditorium, and classrooms.
This situation highlights a common flaw in the status quo thinking by people working in the current school security enterprise:
How many school shootings—or mass public shootings—involved a delayed attack by a second shooter after a suicide? The answer is zero. Just like many ‘school security experts’ who are writing emergency plans and presenting training sessions, this unnamed Director of Safety and Security makes three baseless assertions. Here are the facts:
There is no scientific/empirical evidence that lockdown procedures are effective. The Department of Justice documented their ineffectiveness when students and staff were shot through concrete walls while locking down inside classrooms in Uvalde, TX.
Cancelling a lockdown after a suicide doesn’t put any students in ‘serious danger’.
There has never been a second assailant who waited to start an attack after police arrived at the school.
Even worse, there is very real danger when an ‘active shooter’ plan is used for a suicide. In May 2022, a student committed suicide in the cafeteria at Lowellville K-12 School in Ohio. When the school went into lockdown and an ‘active shooter’ alert when out to parents, a mother rushed to the campus with a gun thinking it was the next Uvalde. After attempting to enter the school with her gun, the parent got into a standoff with police, was arrested, and charged with multiple felonies. Using the ‘active shooter’ plan during a student’s suicide almost turned into a deadly shootout between a panicked mom and police.
LOWELLVILLE, Ohio (WKBN) – As chaotic as the scene was in and around Lowellville’s school campus on Thursday, parents started arriving looking to find their children. One student shot himself in the cafeteria. The school was quickly secured. Parents were told to wait at the high school football field for their children to be released.
One of those parents showed up wielding a gun.
If plans and training are based on fantasies and assumptions instead of reality (e.g., there has never been a second school shooter waiting inside a closet for police to find them), we end up with real world procedures that cause more harm than benefit.
When a student commits suicide on campus, there is no threat to any other student and a school does not need to traumatize the entire school community—students, teachers, parents, neighbors—by going on an 'active shooter' focused lockdown. School staff and police knew they were dealing with an isolated suicide inside a bathroom within 60 seconds, at that point staff needed to shift away from the 'active shooter' plan.
Only having an ‘active shooter’ plan results in a unnecessary trauma
Applying an ‘active shooter’ procedure to every situation when a gun is fired on campus creates a serious flaw in planning, training, and misaligns response procedures with the circumstances of most shootings.
Instead of having one plan for the very rare 'active shooter' situation, schools need to realize there are six general categories of gun violence on campus. From analyzing these categories, suicides are more common than planned attacks and need their own plan/procedures.
These categories of gun violence on campus are:
Accidents (e.g., school police officer fires gun while using the bathroom)
School-Related Conflicts (e.g., fight that escalates into a shooting)
Intimate and Familial Conflicts (e.g., domestic violence at drop-off)
Criminal Activity (e.g., student shot while being robbed on campus)
Suicides or Attempted Suicides
Indiscriminate (e.g., planned attack targeting random victims)
In fact, all five of the non-active shooter situations are more common than an indiscriminate attack on campus.
Why don’t schools have different plans for the most common types of gun violence they will experience? Here is an in-depth discussion about it:
Podcast: Ep 24. Understanding Different Forms of Gun Violence in American Schools
Research paper: Understanding Different Forms of Gun Violence in American Schools: An Analysis from 1980 to 2019 by Daniel E Hamlin:
Scholars theorize that the nature of school gun violence varies across school settings. Yet, there is a lack of statistical research testing this idea. This study investigates contextual factors associated with six forms of school gun incidents (N = 1,238) over a 40-year period (1980–2019) in the United States. To conduct the analyses, school, community, and state-level data were linked to school gun incidents recorded in a comprehensive K–12 school gun violence database. Results indicate that the most common form of school gun violence stems from school-related conflicts. Gun incidents from school-related conflicts (odds ratio [OR] = 2.22, p < .01) and suicides (OR = 3.08, p < .01) are also more likely to occur in high schools. Large cities (OR = 4.75, p < .001), midsize cities (OR = 2.35, p < .01), and suburbs (OR = 2.74, p < .05) report more school gun violence driven by criminal activity, whereas school gun violence from suicide and indiscriminate school shootings has a higher probability of occurring in rural schools and areas with comparatively low poverty. This study offers suggestive evidence that an emphasis on alleviating school conflicts may reduce school gun violence overall but that separate strategies may also be needed across different types of school contexts.
Planning for gun violence on campus
The good news is that preparing for most types of gun violence on campus is fairly simple. If there is a domestic, fight, or shooting relating to criminal activity, the shooter almost always flees before police arrive.
This means the only thing that school staff need to do is make sure that students are kept away from the crime scene and call the police. Nobody at the school is in any danger at this point.
If there is an accident on campus, when the person with a gun was a student or visitor, they usually flee immediately. If the person with a gun was a police officer, parent, or school staff member, they usually surrender or call 911 themselves. If this happens, staff just need to keep students away from the crime scene and call 911 for EMS and police assistance. Nobody at the school is in any danger at this point.
If a student commits suicide on campus, school staff need to provide first aid, secure the firearm used, call 911 for EMS and police assistance, keep students away from the crime scene, and start providing emotional support services to reduce the trauma of knowing a classmate just died inside the school. Nobody at the school is in any danger at this point.
During the roughly 6% of shootings that are a deliberate attack, schools should have a plan to get students away from the attacker as quickly as possible. Most planned attacks begin and end inside the same room, which means that a lockdown is not a very good plan because students are already inside the same room with the attacker. Also, most school shootings are committed by current students at the school who know the lockdown plan. When a planned attack happens, a lockdown is probably the worst action to take because kids would be safer evacuating from the campus!
Data analysis of 'insider' school shootings like Apalachee High
Does the killing really continue until police engage a school shooter?
In the 25 years since Columbine, planned attacks at schools have had more victims with a higher fatality rate which means the current security paradigm is not working. At the same time, the intent of the first lockdown plans created back in 1999 wasn’t to traumatize the entire school if there was a suicide or shots fired during a fight on campus.
We need to analyze data to understand the circumstances and outcomes of these six different categories of shootings on campus instead of just recycling the same ‘active shooter plan’ that is rooted in assumptions, not real-world incidents.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
Your article is flawed on many levels. For starters, authorities protecting children in this age of terror attacks need to anticipate dynamic methods that have not been traditionally utilized. If all we needed was historical data to predict what the next attack will look like, our jobs would be much easier. In other opinion pieces you lay out how easy it is to subvert school security measures, which it seems you enjoy doing. How radically irresponsible and unrealistic of you to suggest that authorities can make assumptions about what took place in a bathroom where there were apparently no witnesses and a deceased student and a weapon. Do better.