Active Shooter Incidents and What They Teach

Every active shooter incident leaves a record, and the record is the most useful thing we have. Not because studying an attack undoes it, but because attacks are not random events that appear out of nowhere. They are planned. Planning takes time, planning leaves traces, and the traces are visible to people who know what they are looking at.

The federal record is public and worth reading directly. The FBI publishes an annual study of active shooter incidents in the United States, and we point at it rather than summarising it, because the primary source outlives anybody’s summary.

That is the reason this library exists. Each analysis below examines a documented incident or a pattern across incidents, and asks the same question every time: what existed before this began, and who could have seen it?

Row of commercial airliners parked at gates on an airport ramp, the routine travel behind active shooter incidents analysis and prevention work
Commercial. The most common way to the next one.

Why this library keeps growing

Every photograph on this page is a departure, and every entry below is a study of active shooter incidents that already happened. That was not a design choice, it is what the work looks like from the inside. The next one is always somewhere else, and getting there is commercial most weeks, a military installation some weeks, chartered when the calendar leaves no other option.

Air refueling tanker aircraft parked on a military airfield ramp beside vehicles, one route to prevention work on a Department of Defense installation
Military. Different gate, same job.

What matters is not the travel. It is what the travel keeps proving. The same failures turn up in a school, a hospital, an arena and a federal building, across different states, different years and different people in the room. Evil does not discriminate, and neither does the pattern. That is also the hopeful part, because a pattern that repeats is a pattern that can be learned, taught and interrupted.

What the record actually shows

Three findings hold across the documented cases, and they are the foundation of the P.R.O. Model™, which stands for Prevention, Response, Options. The U.S. Department of Justice selected it as “A” national standard for active shooter prevention, first for the 2022–2025 cycle and again for 2026–2030. The P.R.O. Model™ is also in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense.

Table 1. Recurring findings across documented active shooter incidents
Finding What it means in practice
There is a planning period Attacks are prepared, not triggered. The window is measured in weeks and months a
Someone usually knew something Concern is frequently noticed. It is far less frequently routed anywhere useful
Response time is the wrong scoreboard Measuring minutes accepts the attack. Prevention measures the attacks that never start b

Source: ASPP™ analysis of publicly documented incidents and after-action reporting.
a Planning length varies by case and is not fixed. It is a window, not a rule.
b A prevented attack produces no incident record, so this measure is inferred rather than counted directly.

How we write about incidents

We name incidents, locations and dates, because those are public record and doctrinally necessary. We do not name victims and we do not name attackers. Naming the person who did it hands them the thing many of them wanted, and naming the people it happened to costs a family something and buys the reader nothing. Collective framing carries the lesson perfectly well.

Incident analysis

Prevention, and why it works

Schools

Workplace, healthcare and soft targets

Business jet parked on an airport ramp under overcast sky, chartered travel to a prevention engagement
Chartered, when the schedule leaves no other option.

Response, technology and aftermath

Chris Grollnek, former U.S. Marine and retired police detective corporal, standing in an aircraft hangar beside a business jet
Between one and the next.

Working with ASPP™

#NEVERHERE™ is the destination. The P.R.O. Model™ is how we get there.

The P.R.O. Model™  ·  P.R.O. Model™ Workshops  ·  Request a consultation

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