#HEARING THE SOUND OF A GUNSHOT FULL#

– First, acknowledge the fact that an active shooter event can happen anywhere. So, what can you do to avoid the mis-identification of gun shots and increase your odds of escaping an active shooter event? Here are some suggestions:

Don’t rely solely on your ability to hear the shots as your means to find the gunman! Asking the victims or fleeing students where the shooter is will also be a vital tactic.

Rather than relying on hearing the shots, you should be gathering intelligence on the shooter’s location by looking for blood, empty cartridge cases, and smoke. That tactic doesn’t work when you don’t hear the gunfire! If you are a police officer reading this, I strongly suggest that you abandon this approach. Many police active shooter response courses teach officers to “run to the sounds of the guns”. Not only does this muffling issue affect potential victims, it also changes police response. The officers trying to find me did not even hear the shots from just one floor below my location! I was firing blanks from an AR-15 rifle in a vacant multi-story office building. Sometimes, you won’t be able to hear the shots at all! I remember playing the role of the active shooter for a neighboring police agency’s training scenario. The shots sound muffled and the direction from which they are being fired is difficult to determine.

#HEARING THE SOUND OF A GUNSHOT FULL#

Even when the person playing the role of the shooter is firing full power blank cartridges, it is difficult to locate him inside a school or office building. I’ve participated in numerous active shooter training scenarios where I have been tasked with finding the “shooter” inside a large building. Gunfire inside a building doesn’t sound like gunfire at the shooting range. The faster you or your children can recognize the sounds of gunfire, the better your chances for escape will be. It is important to quickly be able to distinguish gunfire from other less lethal sounds. Victims trapped inside the Virginia Tech classroom building during that school shooting believed they were hearing construction noises, not gunshots. In the Beslan School massacre, people thought the initial shots were popping balloons. The same was true when two students began shooting inside Columbine High School. In the Oikos California college shooting last April (where 10 people were shot), victims reported thinking that the gun shots were fireworks. His first instinct was to rationalize the sounds as being from something more familiar…he thought the gunshots were actually plastic bags being popped by fellow students. He was in the same room as the shooter and heard the shots. I heard a pop and thought it was a bag because people do that”. In a recent school shooting, Jordan Coates, a student at the school stated: In almost every mass shooting, victims report that they heard a loud noise, but thought it was some other more innocuous sound.

With all the recent active shooter/active killer events happening worldwide, I’m continuing to see reports of the exact same phenomenon….people don’t recognize the sounds of gunfire when they are being shot at.

Hearing the sound of a gunshot