Definition
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS 2008), an active shooter is a person “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area” (DHS 2017 p. 2). This individual is aggressively involved in killing or attempting to kill people in an occupied location.
Introduction
There is a plethora of information on emergency response to active shooters available through various federal, state, and local agencies. Statistics provided by these agencies help us understand various information from each shooting including age, sex, demographics, social economics, the type of weapon used, and the venue of the shooting in an effort to correlate factors trying to understand comparisons or reasons if any.
In a typical active shooter scenario, people are in the process of their daily lives, perhaps sitting at a desk, in an open area like a classroom or hospital waiting area. All of a sudden, the sound of gunfire erupts. Most people’s adrenaline...
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References
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Department of Homeland Security (2008). Active shooter – How to respond – Homeland Security. Accessed at: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/active_shooter_booklet.pdf
Department of Homeland Security. (2017). Active shooter recovery guide. Accessed at: https://www.dhs.gov/publication/active-shooter-recovery-guide.
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Further Reading
Doss, K. T., & Shepherd, C. D. (2015). Active shooter. Preparing for and responding to an active threat, Oxford: Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann.
Haddow, G., Bullock, J., & Coppola, D. (2017). Introduction to emergency management (6th ed.). Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Roig-Debellis, K., & Fisher, R. G. (2018). Choosing hope: How I moved forward from life’s darkest hour. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
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Cassidy, K.A. (2019). Criminals: Active Shooters. In: Shapiro, L., Maras, MH. (eds) Encyclopedia of Security and Emergency Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69891-5_21-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69891-5_21-1
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