This week we look at the heroic actions of school teacher Brady Olson of North Thurston High School in Lacey, Wash., about 60 miles southwest of Seattle. According to reports, “the popular teacher is being hailed as a hero after tackling a 16-year-old student who fired two shots into the air. No one was injured after the teen shot toward the ceiling in the school commons before classes began. The shooter is in custody. ”
This is the best possible outcome for this story and we applaud Mr. Olson for his bravery and quick actions to save students from an active shooter. He is a real hero.
Mr. Olson rightly did what had to be done given the circumstances, but if we can do a better job of getting ahead of an issue, we could eliminate, or at a minimum reduce, the need for a teacher or student to ever have to physically risk themselves to save others.
We don’t know if Mr. Olson’s school provided training that would prepare teachers and others to address these issues, ideally in a more proactive manner. Mr. Olson’s bravery is absolute but the need for it is the real problem with the story.
We all have hero fantasies where we save vulnerable people from bad guys. This can be a fun daydream, but it is deadly in a number of ways.
- Heroes and heroines in real life aren’t bulletproof. We’ve studied too many crime scenes where wannabe heroes charged an active shooter. Frequently such charges end up adding another victim. If you see an opening to safely do it, do it. But few people are trained in how to take down a gunman.
- The other students waited for someone else to act. Students can be an early warning system to prevent violence. According to a recent FBI study, many active shooter incidents were prevented entirely by other students (frequently girls) who alerted school authorities early that there was a problem brewing or someone brought a gun on campus.
- Such “save everyone at the last second” fantasies fail to look at school or workplace violence as a chronic problem that needs to be addressed systematically. Schools (and workplaces) need to:
- Build a physical system of threat detection (cameras, metal detectors, etc.).
- Build a social network where students are encouraged to say something when they see something.
- Create training for students and teachers to contain threats and protect the vulnerable. (Mr. Olson’s tackling job counts as containment.)
- Create a culture that trains people to de-escalate conflicts before someone reaches for a gun. Even if this kid started just by showing off, never intending to harm anything more than a ceiling tile, once a gun comes out, there’s no telling what can happen next. One Georgia school secretary kept a gunman at bay, simply by talking him down, sharing struggles in her life to build empathy and calm him.
We at Soteria Safety By Design don’t just upgrade the security of your physical environment (whether it is a school or an office complex), but through training we also upgrade the safety of your culture so everyone can live, laugh and learn safely. This training turns everyone into a hero.
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