Emergency preparedness

It’s probably a coincidence that my company—located in Downtown D.C.—scheduled what they called training sessions in emergency preparedness (in reality, just presentations by various representatives of local agencies) yesterday. Yesterday being the day of walkouts by elementary to high school students across the country highlighting the most recent round of mass shootings at schools and demanding that our leaders take action on gun control.

I mean, I’m sure the awareness sessions were planned some time ago, but in addition to the usual disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, cyber attacks, bombings, floods—we had something new: what to do in the event of an active shooter in the building.

Turns out you’ve got three options: run, hide or fight, as demonstrated in this video we saw:

(My office door doesn’t have a lock on it, but I could jam my visitor’s chair against the handle. I also have a bottle of Virginia cabernet someone gave me, which would probably be my weapon should the shooter decide to try to enter. That’s assuming that I can’t get to the stairs and run down the nine flights to the ground, which would of course be my first choice of strategies. People in those open-plan offices so favored by the tech industry are stuffed.)

I suppose if our schoolkids have to undergo active shooter survival drills, we should, too. But it pisses me off that the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for GOPig stooges at every level of government are making us go through this instead of actually solving the problem of easy access to guns.

And I’m glad that the kids are showing more backbone than our elected officials.