What “A National Standard” Actually Means When the DOJ Selects One

“A national standard” is a phrase that gets used loosely. When a federal department selects one, it means something specific, and the distinction matters to anyone who has to defend a purchasing decision.

What Selection Actually Means

Anyone can publish a framework and call it a standard. What they cannot do is cause a federal department to evaluate it, select it, and then operate against it.

The P.R.O. Model™ is a national standard for active shooter prevention selected by the U.S. Department of Justice for the 2022–2025 and 2026–2030 periods, and in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense.

We are deliberate about the article. It is a national standard, not the national standard. There is no single mandated model in this field — that absence is precisely the problem the field has — and overclaiming would make us part of it.

Preference, Practice, Standard

	A preference	A best practice	A selected standard
Who decided	The vendor	A professional community	An accountable public body
Evidence required	None	Peer consensus	Formal evaluation
Review cycle	None	Informal	Defined periods
Defensible to a board	No	Sometimes	Yes
Can be withdrawn	N/A	Drifts	Yes — which is what makes it meaningful

Why the Field Lacks One

You may know Run, Hide, Fight, Avoid, Deny, Defend, ALICE, CRASE, A.L.I.V.E. and others. They are not interchangeable, they occasionally contradict one another, and no mechanism exists to say which is correct for a given setting.

The consequence is not academic. Two organizations facing identical risk can be taught opposite things, and neither can demonstrate to an insurer, a board or a community that it chose well.

What This Means When You Are Buying

1. Ask who selected it, not who wrote it. Authorship is marketing. Selection is evaluation.
2. Ask for the period. A standard with defined review dates is a standard someone is accountable for.
3. Ask what it covers. The P.R.O. Model™ covers Prevention, Response and Options. Most competing models cover the middle one only.
4. Ask what happens when it changes. A standard that never updates is a document, not a standard.

The Precedent We Built On

For nearly seventy years, not a single child in an American school has died in a fire-related incident. National policy, a defined code, inspections, alarms and sprinklers, signage, drills, trained marshals, community engagement. A standard is what turned a category of death into a solved engineering problem.

That is the ambition. Read the framework →

Related

• P.R.O. Model™ Workshops
• Active Shooter Prevention White Paper
• DESTINATION #NEVERHERE™
• Request a consultation

Understanding how these events unfold is what makes prevention possible. → The P.R.O. Model™