Curse the fact that my workplace bans guns and so made me leave my gun at home. Then I’d start planning my lawsuit for if I was shot but survived.
Let’s see…given how I reacted the last time something similar* happened, things would go down for me like this:
- Totally not realize something was going wrong.
- Spend the first few seconds of someone telling me “Oh my God, there’s a madman and he’s shooting at everybody” in denial.
- Freeze up and panic.
- Get my stupid useless self shot.
…yeah. No heroics from me, sorry. 
*I drove into a shopping center teeming with police cars and made a beeline for a different store for art supplies. Turns out the bank in said shopping center was being robbed. Police officers armed with shot guns had to search the trunk of every car before they cleared them to leave. :smack:
What would I do to a rampaging madman with a high power rifle? Like my fellow loin-girded brethern, I would put the whoop-ass on him with extreme prejudice. How?
It’s a good idea to run these scenarios in your head. Everyone should think about what to do if they wake up smelling smoke and the smoke detector is going off, of what to do if you hear braking glass or a door being kicked in when you are at home. When an emergency happens, it’s too late to plan what to do. Adrenalin does not make you smarter. Same for this situation.
I volunteer one day a week in my son’s grade 1 classroom. In the case of an active shooter in our school, we implement the lock-down plan, which has been already practiced by the students and teachers. My plan is:
1)Wait besides the door.
-
Call 911 to report myself to police, tell them what room I’m in, and ask them to identify themselves when they open the door. I don’t want to be shot by the response team trying to take on their point man. .
-
If a shooter tries to enter the room, I intend to try to get temporary control of his barrel with my right hand. My left had will be busy trying to drive the knife blade of my Leatherman through his eye socket into his brain. Even if I can’t get to the brain, eye injuries often make people go fetal & let go of whatever they’re holding.
I put my odds of getting shot at least once at about 50%. But let’s face it: my son is behind me. Dying is an acceptable outcome if I can save his life. Not preferable, but acceptable. Hopefully EMS is not too far behind, and we are close to a decent trauma center.
Now in Canada, we’re likelier to have our government cancel all income tax before they allow citizens to carry firearms, but many US states allow this. One Texas school district allows teachers and staff to carry concealed firearms in the classroom . Utah allows college and university students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on Campus and Arizona is contemplating the same thing. So at least some students and teachers will not be left defenseless, even if a sharpened #2 pencil can be a surprisingly deadly weapon.
Ok, dotchan makes some good points. My first response as someone tells me the noise isn’t lab services moving a loaded rack down the hallway would probably be -
“Yeah, ok. Sure. Tell him to keep it down, would you?” and go back to surfing… er, I mean working, so I wouldn’t notice until I’d already been shot.
It’s probably completely unrealistic, but my thought is that I’d try to remain unnoticed until the gunman got close enough for me to actually strke him, then I’d fight for all I was worth. I’m a big guy, pretty strong for my age, and it would be my intention to cause as much harm and damage on the shooterdude as possible before being shot to death. One thing I’m not gonna’ do is curl up under my desk and wait to be shot. I would hope that if I could pose some resistance, it would spur others to action, too.
Something you have to decide for yourself, but is your life worth your job… No, is your job worth your life? Yeah, that’s it.
The main point of having a license to carry a concealed weapon is that it’s concealed. As I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would never turn it on my fellow coworkers (unless they went rogue), I don’t feel any guilt at all about disregarding company policy.
Then again, I’m not in a high risk industry, nor in a location that’s conducive to this kind of thing, so I don’t get fanatical about it. If there are layoffs (and I survive them) I’ll probably carry for a month or so after just in case someone does go postal. But it’s more likely I’ll get carjacked by a killer bumble bee with a glass eye.
Well, considering that all my classes are in ground-level rooms and that the school is bordered on two sides by woods, I’d hopefully have enough presence of mind to run for the doors despite the instructions to remain huddled in the corner. It’s likely that I would just do exactly that, though.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I think . . . head for the counter where Japan airlines keeps all the confiscated scissors in small cardboard boxes and get one of them to stab him with . . . this is of course assuming that I and all the other armed folks I work with (about 70 of us) have run out of ammo. I and some of the others carry a Glock and 52 rounds, but H&K bearers MMV.
I volunteer in my youngest child’s elementary school all the time. If such a thing happened, I’m usually in the volunteer room towards the back of the school, so I would hopefully have time to run to my daughter’s classroom. It’s actually a portable out back of the school, so hopefully all the kids would have time to get out of it and run as far as they could. As I ran to her classroom, I would be yelling at the other classrooms I ran by.
The school is locked up all day, and you have to be buzzed into the school’s front doors (camera is right there), so at least nobody can sneak in the back. That security measure was implemented shortly after the Amish school attack; before that parents pretty much came as went as we pleased (we’re a small community).
It’s a horrible scenario to contemplate.
Based on the warren in which I currently work, I’d likely wind up showing him a trail of breadcrumbs to find his way out. In all seriousness, I’d bolt.
Option 2 might be to barricade up in one the windowless rooms in which I work, assuming he’ll never find me. Since it’s Soviet Canuckistan, I know there are no civilian guns around, so Option 3 is clout him with a chair, or else with my boss.
Now I wish I had a Glock or a mountain of scissors.
I work in a big enormous factory with plenty of steel platforms used to hold stock. I’d stop drop and roll my cowardly ass right underneath one of those and clap my hand over my mouth.
This plan counts on the other chicks all screaming and making targets of themselves and one of the dudes going Rambo and taking the guy out, but it’s the best I can come up with.
Get my gun from the car and take out Frank from accounting. I never liked that guy. Then rush off to the other end of the building and take out management. They’ve had it coming for some time. These can all be blamed on the shooter. If I have time, I’ll try and take out the shooter, but not until after I’ve finished cleaning house.
Items within reach that can be thrown in defense include:
a coffee mug (I was a pitcher in Little League. Watch out.)
a telephone
a framed picture of the wife and me
a D-link router
a Swingline stapler (I kept mine because it didn’t bind up as much)
a half-eaten container of noodles (“Did you just throw fettucini at me?” “No, it’s hamburger helper.” “Oh, you’re really dead now.”)
Beyond that, maybe I can give a shooter a paper cut. While shitting myself. Or I can run out the back door into the alley while shitting myself/screaming like a little girl.
Don’t forget to quip “This time - it’s Personnel!” on your way out.
Assuming the shooter started shooting as soon as they entered the building I’d have some time to hide, as I work in the western end and the entrance is in the middle. I’m thinking I’d go for the walk-in cooler. There’s a window in the door, and a light, but the light can be turned off. Push a rack in front of the door and duck down below line of sight. Chilly, but bearable for the likely amount of time I’d have to hide.
Actually, I already put my plan in motion. In every job I always befriend the craziest people in the company.
“Noooooooo!”
BLAM!!!
"Ahhhhhh!:
BLAM!!!
“Argh!”
BLAM!!!
“Whatsup Jeff?”
“Oh heya Smith! Still on for lunch?”
“You betcha!”
“Help!”
BLAM!!!
Actually, I think I’ll probably say “there’s a cute guy who needs help with his benefits over that way” as I go through.
Is that what I tripped over?
I’m next to an emergency exit, so I’d probably run for it. My desk is also positioned in such away that I could get underneath it and if you rushed into my office it would look empty. But if you came all the way in to my office to look around you’d see me under there.
It would depend where I am at work. If I am at my desk, then I would probably just crouch and hide. I would like to think that I would be smart enough to close the door, turn off the lights, get the miniature fog machine that is behind my desk, fill the office with a thick fog, grab something big and heavy and when they open the door, the fog will disorient them and not make them able to aim. While they are fumbling in the dark and fog I would hit them with the big heavy object and run.
If I was downstairs I would arm myself with something from the shop. Unfortunately most of the dangerous tools are corded, so that would limit my options. The theatre is a maze of hallways and stairs that can be confusing if you don’t know where you are going, so I would have a advantage of knowing all the good hiding spots, and all the exits that the public would not know existed.