A National Standard of Prevention

A national standard of prevention for a safer tomorrow. We begin now.

America has reached a turning point. Headlines from schools, from businesses, from places of worship have become familiar in a way no country should accept. Prevention does not start with fear. It starts with a plan that works, and with the willingness to build one before it is needed.

The Active Shooter Prevention Project (ASPP™) exists because that plan was missing. Under Chris Grollnek, creator of the P.R.O. Model™, ASPP™ built one and then submitted it to the only test that counts: examination by people with no reason to be generous.

What a standard actually does

Consider the last time a child was lost to a fire in an American K-12 school. It was roughly seventy years ago. That did not happen because the country got better at putting out fires.

It happened because a standard was built and enforced. Sprinklers, materials, exit widths, inspections, drills, a fire marshal with the authority to close a building that failed. Stop, drop and roll is the last four seconds of that system, and it is the only part most people can name, which is exactly the point: the standard did its work long before anyone had to remember a phrase.

Run, hide, fight is also four seconds. The difference is that nobody built the seventy years of system underneath it. That gap is what the P.R.O. Model™ was written to close, and it is why prevention has to come first in the sequence rather than last in the budget.

What the Department of Justice selected, and what it did not

In 2022 the Executive Office for United States Attorneys went looking for a better way to prepare its people. It selected the P.R.O. Model™ as “A” national standard for active shooter prevention, and it selected it again for the following cycle. Two consecutive program windows, 2022–2025 and 2026–2030, under two officials, across two administrations.

The resulting National Active Shooter Prevention Training Video was built for 10,700 Assistant United States Attorneys and filmed at the Ernest F. Hollings National Advocacy Center. It is in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense.

Now the part that matters more than the credential: ASPP™ is not a Department of Justice vendor, is not certified by the Department of Justice, and is not endorsed by it. Federal agencies do not endorse companies, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What was recognized is the framework, as a national standard for prevention. That distinction is the whole reason the recognition is worth anything at all.

The record is documented at DOJ recognition of the P.R.O. Model™.

Prevention and response are two different lanes

Response training in this country already has a standard. ALERRT was named the national standard in active shooter response training for first responders by the Department of Justice and the FBI in 2013, and it works. Officers who train on it move faster and better than officers who do not.

But response begins at the sound of the first shot, and by then the available outcomes have already narrowed to bad ones. Most incidents are over in under eight minutes. Roughly five of those minutes pass before anyone reliably calls for help, and dispatch needs six separate pieces of information before a unit can be sent anywhere useful.

Prevention operates in the weeks and months before that clock ever starts. In something close to nine out of ten cases there was leakage: a statement, a post, a behavior, a change somebody noticed and nobody connected. That is the window. It is wide, it is quiet, and almost nothing in the national conversation is aimed at it.

Why this is not theory

Chris Grollnek was on scene at an active shooter incident involving a vehicle-borne explosive device, more than a thousand rounds fired, and 168 of them directed at responding officers. He is a former U.S. Marine and retired police detective corporal. The doctrine was not assembled from case files; it was written by someone who had already been inside the problem and then spent years studying why it keeps recurring.

The United States Army, in its own published account of the Blue Grass Army Depot detection demonstration on 8 October 2024, called him “one of the country’s foremost authorities on active shooters.”

That sentence is worth more than any sentence ASPP™ could write about itself, for the simple reason that ASPP™ did not write it.

What the standard asks of you

Very little that costs money, and that is deliberate. Know your environment and know how to leave it. Take a stated intention to do harm seriously and report it the first time, because the people who later say they never saw it coming were almost always told. Make sure information does not sit isolated in one person’s head. Understand your own emergency plan well enough to act inside it without hesitating.

Where technology helps, it helps by buying time: detection before the first shot, notification that reaches everyone at once, and delay built into the doors and glass an attacker has to get through. ASPP™ does not sell, resell, or take a margin on any of it. That independence is why an assessment finding is worth reading.

Destination #NEVERHERE™

Through ASHER 360, the nonprofit arm, the work extends to organizations that could never fund it alone: schools, congregations, and families. The School Ranger Program trains dual-role professionals who prevent harm rather than waiting to respond to it.

#NEVERHERE™ is the destination. The P.R.O. Model™ is how we get there. Prevention. Response. Options. In that order.

The first conversation is free and carries no obligation.