S.A.V.E. Yourself: DSU’s Active Shooter Training

On January 23^rd and 24^th at 3 PM and 7 PM active shooter training lessons took place in the auditorium of the Tunheim Classroom Building. These lessons were taught by Chad Sheehan, a law enforcement veteran of 23 years. The course was orchestrated and brought to campus by the safety resource officer on campus, Heath Abraham.

In the past there have been active shooter training conferences for the professional staff on campus. Sheehan has been teaching his course to a variety of schools and various professions. In total he has taught approximately 250,000 people.

The lesson focused mainly on self-preservation and survival during an active shooter event. There were four key components to the program. The S.A.V.E. yourself acronym stands for: survive a violent encounter. This is broken down further into four steps: shelter, awareness, violence stops violence, and evacuate. The main goal within an active shooter incident is to avoid becoming an easy target which will help with staying alive.

The key to survival: make yourself harder for the active shooter to access and hit. This can be done by finding shelter, somewhere the shooter cannot easily access. Being aware of your surroundings. If confronted by the shooter make it harder for them to hit you. Lastly, evacuate and get away from the shooter by whatever means necessary. There was also mention of breaking the Hollywood shooting troupe within the lesson, most of the steps above fit the real life scenarios of the troupes.

When questioned over the possibility of having further training on the DSU campus Officer Abraham stated, “If students give good feedback on this, and advocate for more training and awareness then that will happen.“