In the wake of the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, it was the churches that came calling.
When gunmen opened fire at malls in Omaha, Nebraska, and Burlington, Washington, in 2007 and 2016, respectively, it was the shopping centers that made the requests.
For years, mass shootings have been the catalyst for a surge in requests for active shooter trainings for the niche industry that offers them, and the two weeks after back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have brought more inquiries and business to firms whose focus is on ensuring the public and companies are prepared.
“The shootings have just confirmed for the world that these are not going away anytime soon,” Jesus Villahermosa, owner of Crisis Reality Training, said. “Active shootings have become part of our society.”
Villahermosa, a former deputy sheriff, is booked for trainings into 2020, and this month’s attacks pushed clients on the fence to confirm appointments, he said.
“Corporate America is starting to realize a six-minute video is not going to cut it, and giving scenario-based stuff on the computer is not going to cut it,” he said. “People need to touch, feel, see the instructor, and have confidence in the instructor.”
Thirty-one people were killed in the Aug. 3 and Aug. 4 shootings at a Walmart in El Paso and an entertainment district in Dayton, and the massacres have brought questions of how best to combat gun violence to the forefront of the national discourse.
But they have also led people and businesses to take safety into their own hands. Jim Hayes, a vice president at Guidepost Solutions, which provides security consulting and active shooter training, said more companies seem to be seeking “holistic assessments” of their facilities, indicating a desire to be proactive to mitigate the risk of a possible violent attack.
“The change has definitely been from an, ‘Oh well, that didn’t happen here,’ to an, ‘Uh-oh, this is happening in many different places,’ and looking internally and saying, ‘Well, we’re not this type of business, but we share these common characteristics,'” Hayes said, adding that businesses are interested in knowing how best to secure their premises and employees now more than ever.
Villahermosa, whose courses are a minimum of three hours, has conducted in-person trainings for more than 30 years. In the years since he began, other companies — many run by veterans or former law enforcement officers — have entered the marketplace. The businesses have moved beyond the “run, hide, fight” training recommended by the federal government and instead teach techniques such as constructing barricades and administering care to victims. They also call for the public to become more aware of their surroundings and know where the exits are in public places.
Chris Kopp, owner of Lockdown International in Huntersville, North Carolina, said his company, too, receives a flood of requests for active shooter trainings in the wake of an attack. But in addition to local businesses and schools reaching out, he has seen an uptick in large corporations seeking training across their workforces.
“Now they’re looking for a standard to roll out to all their businesses. It’s not, ‘Can you come to this one business.’ It’s, ‘We have 33 locations across the country, can you train us?’” he said. “You can’t put it on the back burner anymore. You can’t delegate it to your individual offices.”
From the executive level, Kopp added, corporations now want to ensure all their employees have the same, uniform training.
“It takes more than 30 seconds to process a shooting is even occurring,” he said, noting that nine people were killed in Dayton within that span. “I’m starting to see people now also focusing on situational awareness, and they’re constantly wanting to be aware, whether they go to the mall, the movie theater, out with their kids.”
With communities facing more tragedies that are also becoming deadlier, the National Fire Protection Association released last year a set of standards for active shooter or hostile events. The code advocates public education and calls for programs to include things like bleeding control.
“Running and hiding isn’t always your best option,” Kopp said, adding that both the type of training and delivery of the training offered has changed. More states, for example, now require school staff to undergo in-person training for active shooter situations.
But online options still remain available. Vivid Learning Systems, for example, offers a free active shooter preparedness training available online and saw its traffic quadruple for three days after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, said Christopher Collier, a search engine strategist lead at the company who was attending a middle school in Washington when a teacher and two students were killed in 1996.
“More and more businesses are paying attention to this training because of the day and age we’re in,” he said.
Collier said people have participated in Vivid’s training from the comfort of their own homes, and businesses have used the course for a group of employees.
“If everyone is trained at the lowest common denominator, but the lowest common denominator is a high-level piece of training, that can save lives,” he said.
