A cursing gunman sprinted up the stairs to a second-story meeting.
As he burst into the room, one person ran. The rest threw stuff at him, shoved a couch and chairs at him, and jumped on him as he sprayed bullets. The survivors subdued the gunman.
The gunman shot soft pellets. The thrown stuff was rubber balls – safe-to-hurl substitutes for lamps, books and anything else.
The gunman could not maneuver. He could not aim. He was pinned.
Adrenaline and confusion led to no one knowing who got shot by the soft pellets.
“That was so much better than kneeling down and waiting to get shot,” said Haines firefighter and emergency medical technician Jenn Walsh.
This Tuesday exercise took place on the upper floor of the Haines fire station. Roughly a dozen people participated, including Haines firefighters and police officers, plus one local state park ranger. There were also their counterparts and one teacher from around Southeast Alaska.
The exercise finished a two-day course by the Ohio-based ALICE Training Institute. ALICE is an acronym that stands for Alert, Lock-down, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.
In other words – run or hide or fight.
Or don’t be passive.
The concept is that running, fighting, dodging, throwing, jumping out windows and hiding are better ways to deal with a workplace or school shooter than waiting for that person to fire, said Skagway police chief Ray Leggett, one of the instructors.
“If you want a sure way to die, curl up in an itty-bitty ball and crawl under the table,” Leggett said.
Haines Police chief Heath Scott – who was the gunman in the exercise – called in the two-day training with the idea of teaching borough employees, with the possibility of reaching out to the school district.
“We’re being trained as trainers for this,” Scott said. He is thinking about approaching the school district on if it is interested in the training.
Several federal agencies support training as offered by the ALICE Training Institute.
However, this approach has critics.
The National School Safety and Security Services website argued an occasional training session won’t guarantee students will remember their lessons under real-life stress.
“It is unrealistic to expect 25 students and a teacher to react simultaneously, with split-second accuracy and timing, when a person with a gun unexpectedly walks into a room. Coaches spend hours, weeks and years working with youth to perfect athletic skills, and team dynamics often do not generate such skilled snap judgment capabilities and physical precision in non-life-and-death circumstances,” the website said.
In Tuesday’s training exercise, all the adult participants were poised to react because they knew an attack would erupt in one or two minutes.
Haines Police officer Chris Brown said: “It will all be developmentally appropriate. We are not going to teach kindergarteners the same way we teach seniors in high school.”