“It’ll be just like shooting fish in a barrel.” We here that phrase used all the time. It’s just a figure of speech. What does it mean? Something will be easy to do. Why is shooting fish in a barrel easy? Because you have a “target rich environment.” For you folks who have never been in a combat-oriented position, that means you have an area so full of targets that you can shoot randomly into it and you’re still likely to hit a target. Now, I’d like to discuss two ways that this applies to active shooter events and our preparation/response protocols for them.
First: Our schools, for an active shooter, are target rich environments. We take 20-30 children (sometimes more) and put them inside rooms with nowhere to hide and nothing to take cover behind. There may be places of concealment but not cover. (“Cover” stops bullets; “concealment” only hides you.) If you put ten classrooms on a single floor in one wing of an educational structure, you’ve put 200-300 students in nicely clustered little “barrels,” wherein an active shooter can go and start shooting.
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The remainder of this article is part of the book "Active Killers and the Crimes They Perpetrated," available in print or ebook via Amazon.
