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A lone gunman, lightly armed, in a crowded room
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November 5th, 2009, Fort Hood Texas, a lone gunman, lightly armed, in a crowded room, kills thirteen people and wounds thirty more before he can be stopped. The soldiers in that room who were preparing to deploy had no idea of what was about to happen.
A church sanctuary or classroom can easily afford an attacker this same type of opportunity. A sanctuary full of congregants whose attention is on the service is a virtual killing field for a cowardly gunman. Some churches with limited access to and from the sanctuary would be like shooting rats in a bucket.
Security personnel need to take the time to evaluate fields of fire in their church, particularly in the sanctuary. There are two reasons for this:
1) If you know the best positions to launch an attack you can better watch for a suspicious person moving to one of those positions.
2) For security personnel who are armed, they can establish, before a firefight, the safest direction to shoot, and move to a position that allows them to shoot in that direction.
If someone is intent on carrying out an attack like the one at Fort Hood, most likely they are going to try to establish the best field of fire to begin from. They will also be looking for a position where they can do the most damage before they are stopped or make their escape. Their planning may be deliberate over time and repeated visits, or it may be just a quick check before they start.
A suspicious person, who is moving from point to point with no apparent goal, or who’s spending more time looking over the room instead of looking for a particular person or persons, would be someone worth watching. If they are moving to one of those established fields of fire that security has already determined, they need to be watched and maybe even approached in order to evaluate their intentions.
For the armed security person, they need to position themselves so that, if they have to take a shot, they can have a clear field of fire and backstop if possible. Even an unarmed person who knows these fields of fire and is watching for persons there can position themselves so that they can intercept a gunman as soon as he starts.
With a little pre-planning and some God-given wisdom, a church can dramatically reduce the risk of an attack and even more dramatically lessen the devastation of one if it does happen.
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