Matt Marshall: 0:00

Hey there, GenXers welcome to GenXTalkin. In today's episode, Ed and I are going to review and an important and timely set of ideas around active shooters or active assailant type of scenarios. Before we do ed. Welcome back to the United States of America.

Ed Wasson: 0:21

Thank you. Good to be back. By far the greatest country in the world. And if you don't believe so, I invite you to do some international traveling right now.

Matt Marshall: 0:32

I saw an interesting TicTok on that recently. He claims to be conservative starts his conservative rant about the United States is not the greatest country in the world. Okay then, which country is, I mean, come on Canada. Really? What country? Australia, which one? Egypt?

Ed Wasson: 0:53

Egypt? No.

Matt Marshall: 0:56

Anyways, enough about that. Hey, I know we talk about this a bit on the phone when you were traveling and such, but do you want to share just a little bit about what we're going to be talking? About what you might have planned for the next episode or so around your international trip to Egypt?

Ed Wasson: 1:14

Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Matt. It's great to be back. I appreciate the welcome back. Appreciate your friendship and partnership. And I'm excited for this episode that you've got on active shooter. In the next episode, I want to do a short, maybe 30 minutes or so on what the revelations and discoveries of our trip to Egypt were. And it's going to be focused on the tourist aspect the entertainment and excitement and travel that experience. But also we're going to have some focus on travel during COVID and safety and security throughout your travel, especially to a country like Egypt, which is considered by the United States state department to be a high risk c ountry especially terrorism.

Matt Marshall: 2:05

Well that should be very cool. I'm looking forward to that one. I did have a number of questions for you still, and I'm really looking forward circling back up with with Chris Klein I'm hoping we can find some time in the next maybe month or so, and get him on the show as well.

GXT-EP11 Active Shooter Review PRE DESCRIPT: 2:21

Yeah.

Ed Wasson: 2:21

And we're in close communication with Chris and he's finally, I believe he's back in the U S just a day or two ago when he was telling us I'm leaving Egypt. Finally, he said, I'm just done with this country.

Matt Marshall: 2:35

Hey, man. I mean I was done with the Philippines too after just a couple of days. So then of course I went to Mumbai India, and that place I spent 10 days in, in Kazakhstan and absolutely loved it. And would love to go back. I went from the airport to the hotel in India and said, I've had enough. I'm ready to go home. There's some places that can just tweak you. And I'm not saying that's again, that's not to say anything bad about the Indian people, I'm sure in some places they're just absolutely wonderful people. It's just a completely different culture and not my style.

Ed Wasson: 3:12

That would be Cairo except I would caveat that it is the people, the people are not good people, period. They're just not good people. And it's a cultural thing. It's you can see it's just prevalent throughout the fabric of their society.

Matt Marshall: 3:25

I was traveling internationally a lot during this time I was, I was talking with this guy. I had just been to Mumbai. I was there for maybe three, four days, total. And I called him and I asked him afterwards. I said, I don't understand how you can come from that place, Mumbai India and have any hope in the world, any hope at all, because he was a great guy super nice guy, really helpful. And he said, this is the shame of our culture. People will live in a walled off palace in Mumbai they will climb over the trash and people to get into their Mercedes-Benz car, air conditioned and everything, the climb over people and stomp on them to go off, to work in their nice air conditioned corner office and not care a lick I just don't understand that.

Ed Wasson: 4:17

I met a variety of people like that from different areas to include Cairo met one from Port-au-Prince Haiti. You got the living conditions as they are. And these gyms of human beings come out here to the U S and they'll say we've got some work to do in Port-au-Prince. We've got some work to do in Cairo. We got some work to do in Mumbai or other places,

Matt Marshall: 4:45

some work to do.

Ed Wasson: 4:47

We have some improves. We don't have many sustains, but we have a lot of improves to work on. It's an interesting dynamic. Sure it's a dog eat dog world, but even some of those richer people like that guy, they've got this type of job. They've got this type of house and they just walk through trash and over people to do whatever they do. But you have some that ended up breaking that cycle of madness and get out of it, coming to the worst country on the planet, the United States, where they can shine and flourish, where they can succeed and be the happy, decent, good human being that they're destined to be instead of having to live in that squalor and condition that the United States didn't impose upon these people, by the way, this is just something that is just life, life happened. And in those civilizations, they have lagged behind as far as spiritual and emotional development and being a basic good human being.

Matt Marshall: 5:46

I don't want to get too political here, but if you take certain views of our leftist friends, then they would blame that on British imperialism.

Ed Wasson: 5:57

These are the same kinds of people that would say I was a former socialist and we got in our little group and we went down to Havana, Cuba. And when we got there and we saw that this is the way they were living, we were literally shocked to the core of our soul.

Matt Marshall: 6:15

Well, Hey, let's get to this show. Let's talk about mass shootings and active shooter. Wow. What a topic.

Ed Wasson: 6:22

And it's a very timely topic because corporate America is going to be going back into their workspaces and you may be a hybrid model now, or for awhile, or you may be a hybrid model permanently. Maybe it's going to be going into the office two to three days out of the week, but you're going back to work America.

Matt Marshall: 6:42

It's getting there. for today's show I thought we'd spend a bit of time digging into those details around active shooters and mass shootings. And there's a difference between the two that we'll talk a little bit about that a lot of people just kind of gloss over. I recently attended a webinar presented by a team of people. They call themselves subject matter experts. These were joint terrorism task force folks. These are people who have responded to multiple mass shooting events so there were a lot of very, very experienced people in, large events, such as these. Some were FBI, some were CIA, some were former FBI and now run a more commercial organization. It was an excellent presentation. It flowed in a really clear pattern of preparation action and recovery. And this is what a person or organization business can go through to try to reduce casualties or just simply never have to experience this in their life. It hit me while we were in the middle of that webinar that our audience. Primarily being gen X-ers they're perfect beneficiaries for the information. Many of us we're in positions of management leadership of some sort, maybe executives within the organization, maybe even business owners. And so we're in a perfect situation that we can effect change upon our organizations, upon the people around us to keep them safe. I'll break down each as we go through the discussion today, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts. First, I wanted to quickly define those two terms separating out mass shooter and active shooter. They gave us a list of all these different organizations and how they define mass shootings. Generally it is agreed that it is four or more people are shot or killed in one incident, excluding the perpetrator at one location and roughly at the same time. And then to clarify that there is a difference between mass shootings and active shooter. Active shooter being effectively a person in the act of shooting intending to cause harm. And I want to, I want to also use the term active assailant. Yeah. Because as we know it could be a knife as in Europe. Right.

Ed Wasson: 9:12

Yeah. There's been a number of incidents in Europe they kind of slowed down greatly at about 2016 or so. Yeah. But you had the Barcelona incident where somebody driving through the crowd had a suicide bombing. I believe it was at the Ariana Grande day concert in London. We had stabbings, constantly Interestingly enough there was a spat of them in Germany in about 2014. I believe it was stabbings by migrants from the Syria region, stabbing people on the bus and train shouting Allahu Akbar, but the German government refused to say it was terrorism.

Matt Marshall: 9:53

The truth of the matter is nobody knows how they're going to respond until they're faced with it. Depending on the situation, there was a video that they showed in this presentation where he was an off duty security guard in this building. And this guy walks in with a shotgun and starts blasting away. The off-duty security officer, flip flops and shorts. But he happens to be in an office right behind where the guy just walked in the door. So he blasts a couple of shots and immediately the dude jumps out from behind him, takes him down, smashes him into the floor, removes him of his shotgun because the guy was in the middle of reloading. He runs back into the office to start calling police. So before the police were even called, he took out the shooter. He didn't realize that the guy had a handgun in his boot. And you can see in the video, he reaches down and grabs the hand gun. So the guy comes running back up, takes him down again, smashes him again and chokes him out and holds him down until the on-duty security guard gets there.

Ed Wasson: 10:59

Every situation is different and you can see it happen. And every time we see it in the news, most people would probably say, oh my God, how can this happen? Some other people might think, well, if it was me, I think I would have done this. But that's just for that one particular scenario. Hopefully it never happens to us, but if it does, it's not gonna be like what you saw in the news the last 10 times it's going to be a completely new scenario.

Matt Marshall: 11:30

So we were given some statistics. I'll go through them kind of quickly. But they're mainly related to mass shootings. The majority of mass shootings targeted people, they knew family, friends, coworkers about 57%. And I'm actually a bit surprised because in all the previous presentations that I have seen, and I've seen probably 10, 12 different presentations on active shooters. The way people in law enforcement convey the messaging is it's mostly, almost always people that they know. Maybe this is the separation between mass shooter and active shooter because active shooting has a different set of rules. It's just for some reason law enforcement, when they're giving presentations, they tend to meld these two together. But I think it gets confusing for some people. When it comes to mass shootings, about 61% occurs in the home and then another 10% on top of that in public areas, but still close to home. So really 71% happened in or near the home. Sorry, let me ask you a quick question. Did they give you a statistic as to what percentage of that is a domestic situation? Yeah a lot of them were domestic situations, again, mass shooting type of events. And as you would expect the vast majority are males about 94%. What's interesting here is many of the folks that were responsible for mass shootings were actually prohibited from owning guns.

Ed Wasson: 13:03

This is a really important point because this is something that the states have done a long time ago, starting in the nineties, I believe, especially if it was a domestic violence situation. A lot of the states changed their statutes about domestic violence to where previously the law said, if it was spousal abuse a husband and a wife, number one, they changed it to where domestic violence can be any house hold member X friends, X, roommates, whatever. So they changed that ruling. And then number two, if it meets no contest or you're found guilty in most jurisdictions, you can no longer possess own buy a firearm. You can't reload, you can't own ammo. In some jurisdictions, you can't own a bow and arrow. So it's interesting that you're saying this percentage of it is domestic. So this percentage of it is people that are known. And then of those percentages the person wasn't even supposed to have a firearm.

Matt Marshall: 14:23

I think the thing that makes it even more interesting to me is that that's the argument that some people use against ownership of guns is well, mass shootings and active shooters. People who legally obtain guns are not the people who go out and necessarily commit these atrocities. It's just a false argument to me

Ed Wasson: 14:44

it's just one of those slippery slopes. It's a flawed logic.

Matt Marshall: 14:47

Okay. So speaking of gun laws and such any guesses, which states have the most active shooter incidents,

Ed Wasson: 14:56

I would say states that have a higher percentage of gun restrictions, such as, oh, maybe New York, Maryland California, places like that, maybe.

Matt Marshall: 15:08

Very, very close in California. And we'll, just call it Chicago.

Ed Wasson: 15:15

Hey, it's against the law to own firearms in those places guys. Didn't you read the rules?.

Matt Marshall: 15:21

It's so safe here. My gosh yeah. So California now the two runners up actually are texas and Florida. So it was interesting, but the numbers are twice as many events occurred in California, twice as many events occurred up in Chicago, I'm just going to say Chicago because Illinois it's just Chicago. Cause that's where all the statistics are. At least the bad statistics,

Ed Wasson: 15:46

I mean Texas, and Florida though, you have a lot of people that legally own firearms and especially considering active or mass shooters, you probably have a good percentage of domestic issues. Probably some other cultural dynamics going on in Chicago that are different than some things going on in LA or California. Those areas, a lot of it could be gang violence. That's very similar, but you still may not be comparing apples to apples in Texas. And in Florida, you probably looking at quite a few different variables that's just not the same.

Matt Marshall: 16:24

Yeah. Very, very different. I think maybe the contributors to the presentation, we're trying to keep it as balanced as they could. The last thing I would point out is about 81% was handguns, not necessarily rifles, anything like that.

Ed Wasson: 16:39

Well ease of access and ease of carrying concealing and transporting.

Matt Marshall: 16:45

So do you think that the trend for these type of events, mass shootings, active shooters is going up or down over the last couple of years?

Ed Wasson: 16:55

The last couple of years? I would guess that it's going down a little bit.

Matt Marshall: 17:00

That's absolutely wrong. Oh, no, I'm wrong. When you look at the numbers, I think the numbers that they had captured up to this point was July of 21. So that's last year, halfway through the second year of the pandemic and it was more than it was in 2020.

Ed Wasson: 17:20

Interesting that through COVID I thought there was an increase in suicides, but I didn't know that there was an increase in actual yeah. Mass shooting wow.

Matt Marshall: 17:29

So at this point, I just wanted to break down the first section and again that's preparation, that's action and it's recovery. So the first one being preparation if we take some time and we just learn about the incidents themselves, this will help us become more prepared for when it actually occurs. Right? For instance in 2020, out of all the active shooter events. Now again, this is active shooter events out of 37 events 24 were in commercial locations and more we're in open public spaces.

Ed Wasson: 18:05

So it's rarely occurring all a little. There's something about domestic on the mass shooters, active shooters are occurring. More of a public

Matt Marshall: 18:16

commercial and public spaces. So if you are a business owner out there, if you're an executive or even just in leadership, in a business or in a house of worship, this is where these events are occurring.

Ed Wasson: 18:28

You can immediately then assess right away that your space is at a higher risk than others although it may be very rare, statistically, you're at higher risk in these.

Matt Marshall: 18:45

Because you run a place of business or you're in a place of business or worship you have a much, much higher likelihood of going through an event, like an active shooter event. Okay. What's even more interesting. Ed is once you see the statistics of the place had no security had minimal security and had a lot of security, obvious, clear security available. It is significant to say the least, I think it was about 59 or 60% occurred where there is no security. Sure. Another 20% where there's minimal security. And then of course, almost none occurred where there is security available. so that's number one for a business owner. If you're wanting to avoid these types of events from occurring basically feet on the ground. You have some sort of physical security. You don't necessarily have to hire guards all the time. But badges for your front door. If you just have a badge and train people on no tailgating, don't let people tailgate in behind. You just have a match at the door. If you, if you have a badge door then people can't get in and that's a simple way to secure your building from people coming in

Ed Wasson: 20:04

yeah, that kind of is restrictive for certain levels of business owners. I mean, I feel super safe where I'm at. You know, my friend Nick out there in Albuquerque, he's a captain now I believe, or he's a Lieutenant at the very least . He was working some years ago in one location where he said he was tasing people several times a week. I mean, we're talking about differences in demographics here. And I asked this Plano officer out of curiosity and say how I see you got a taser? How often do you have to use a taser? He said the worst we get is a couple of these urban Cowboys get to drinking, and then they get in a fight. That's about it.

Matt Marshall: 20:45

I fear though, Ed that some people have that level of security and it's false security. And again, three active shooter events occurred in Texas. Texas is a big place, you know, so huge, the likelihood of active shooter occurring in Texas in your area. But also I think it's pretty clear. Everybody knows that there's a lot of people that carry guns. And so there's a lot less likelihood that they're going to try to go into a situation thinking that they're going to live and start shooting people. You know, they're going into it to also probably commit suicide, you know? Cause they're they realize that if I go in and I start shooting, probably someone around me is going to start shooting back.

Ed Wasson: 21:32

That's an interesting thing to consider because a lot of the workplaces, like one of the workplaces I'm familiar with we have armed security guards there and a lot of them are veterans. So they're either military veterans or they're law enforcement veterans. You can tell just by the way they carry themselves. We've got those kind of guys it's just security in some of the work locations that I've seen out here. So it's an interesting consideration that we could be in a false sense of safety and security and not realize if somebody does come in this person is likely considering this is his final act.

Matt Marshall: 22:13

There is this process that the mass shooters and active shooters go through where they perform some intelligence, some surveillance. They have this broad review of attack targets, and then they eventually filter it down to a key target that they're interested in. And then they start doing more surveillance on just that specific target, right? Yeah. They all do it, every single one of them follow this pattern

Ed Wasson: 22:37

but they also have some sort of motive

Matt Marshall: 22:39

Well, I'm not going to say that they do, but that is as you would expect, there are a lot of people who have some tie, disgruntled employee, something to that point. Yes. Yeah. But that's not always the case. It's not, it's not necessarily like an 80, 20 rule. It's like a 50 50 rule. Okay. You know, so not unlike mass shootings what, which are vast majority in the home when it comes to active shooters, not necessarily, it's more like 50-50.

Ed Wasson: 23:13

Okay.

Matt Marshall: 23:14

So because, because what happens is they get so worked up in their mind that I just want to go inflict damage on people because I've been wronged, and so they've got this mental problem in their head. That's causing all this to occur and they're just acting on it.

Ed Wasson: 23:30

And they certainly haven't obviously thought at all the way through, because when they initiated, they could be operating off of emotion and maybe a little bit of an adrenaline. And then once it's initiated, that's probably when they say, oh, I've really screwed up. And now I need to take my own life because there's no other way out.

Matt Marshall: 23:50

Yeah. Or death by cop or whatever it might be. That's that's exactly right.

Ed Wasson: 23:54

You know what that right there Matt. We have to talk about that and we have to stamp our foot on the ground or pound our fist on the desk three times. I have never seen media talk about suicide by cop, and it is a real condition. And if you're going to get on a traffic stop and you're disgruntled and you're tired of the police, I don't know what the percentage or the statistics are, but there's people that are just screw it. And sometimes they get talked down, but. Police have to use deadly force against somebody that's pointing a firearm at them and, even a knife you're watching the video armchair quarterbacking a week or two later . And you say, you know what? I think he's trying to suicide by cop. Maybe they didn't need to shoot him. Well, when you're the police officer right there on the ground and you're within six feet of somebody with the knife or gun, your mission as a police have a right to live. Yeah. They have a right to go home to get your wife and kids. Yeah. So they, they can't second guess this and be you know what, maybe I think this, guy's not gonna stab me with that knife. Yeah. It's, it's a sad, reality

Matt Marshall: 25:13

What did they say? Just, just shoot the knife out of their hand or that's just ridiculous. And I'll tell you what someday man, try it.

Ed Wasson: 25:21

I'm a fifth award Marine rifle expert and a fifth award pistol expert. And I took the pistol range at the law enforcement academy. I will tell you I'm a good shot when I get practiced up again. I'm at shot in a few months maybe, but when I get practiced up again, I'll show you my targets. If I can, I can drive attack. Yeah. I cannot shoot the knife out of somebody's hand, especially if he's waving that next, like

Matt Marshall: 25:47

this, I'll get you and I'm going to get you a shot.

Ed Wasson: 25:50

So I shot him in the head 3, 4, 5 times. I don't know, but I shot him in the

Matt Marshall: 25:55

head. I was trying to shoot the knife out of his hand, man.

Ed Wasson: 25:59

His hand, the knife was going like this. Look at the video,

Matt Marshall: 26:03

shoot the knife out of his hand.

Ed Wasson: 26:05

I have it on body camera. Right? Check, check out the video. I told him, drop the knife. Five times. There was a case I believe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was captured on video and there's a police officer responding to a restaurant I believe. Somebody with a knife is literally chasing the police officer round his car two or three times. And finally the police officers like boom, boom, boom. I thought they were going to burn the town down. I believe it turned out the guy was a little mental but how many laps around his police car does a police officer have to run fleeing from somebody with a knife.

Matt Marshall: 26:47

Well, Hey, we better get back on track. Okay. So the fundamental piece here is, if you're a business owner it's protection. It's making yourself a hard target. So there's a number of things you can do as an organization. Obviously, if it's just a small business, just install badge type of environments, lock your doors, make it so people can't get in and out. It'll also block out those solicitors that you don't want to bother with. Some other things give some thought to a vulnerability assessment. You can, you can have a separate organization come in and do it for you. You can just do it yourself. You can have a friend come into my place of business. And if you have a friendly doing it, then you learn some things. But in addition to that, there's also some legalities . So if you're a mid-size larger organizations, you might have to consider including legal, including compliance, things like that. Always, gotta remember and keep it legal. So maybe perform some some penetration testing, some threat management. What happens if, and when an event like this occurs training employees on how to act during certain scenarios. Right? Right.

Ed Wasson: 27:52

I was going to say, you can actually craft a policy on it and get if you're the head or some type of leader of the organization, and you don't know anything about it. You can ask for a volunteer that might have some type of military law enforcement or security background help me study the legalities and the security situation and help me craft some sort of a policy so we can train our employees. I think we're at higher risk for this. We've done a risk assessment. Let's craft a policy and some type of training and education for our people. So at least they know this can help us mitigate and reduce the risk.

Matt Marshall: 28:33

Yeah. Making yourself a hard target. And then, if the event occurs that you have properly trained employees. One of the biggest things. I mentioned it at the beginning, you never know how you personally are going to react to a scenario like this. You could be just somebody who just lays on the ground and cries, who knows what you're going to do. But if you've, if you've trained yourself and trained your employees for loud noises. At the old church that I went to, there was a state police officer and he helped the church officials establish a plan for active shooters. He actually put us through training one Sunday and he said, okay, I'm going to be firing blanks, but I'm going to be in the back. You guys will all see me once you hear the gun go off, you all follow the process to evacuate quickly. Right. And so, and they trained us on how to do it. That's part of the training is just making people aware of what it sounds like. That it's not just a backfire of a car in the out in the parking lot. It's, you'll hear pop pop, or you hear pop, pop, pop, that noise, you'll be more familiar with the noise. And then of course, take yourself to a gun range, buy a gun, get trained on a gun, get concealed, carry, whatever you can to be a person who is familiar with these type of weapons and how they can affect others in the world.

Ed Wasson: 29:57

Yeah. I would caveat onto that, maybe tap somebody with some type of security background. You kind of set some limits for them, because I mean, if you're talking this former state police guy or a former special forces guy, and you say, well, I want to make us a little bit of a harder target. This guy is going to say, well, we need to construct a 10 foot chain link fence here with the concertina wire facing out and make a rabbit run and microwave beams over here. So we detect any motion and then badge system. And you're like, dude, we were operating the circle K over here. We don't need all that.

Matt Marshall: 30:36

We still want to be kind of welcoming and we don't want to scare all the attendees away for sure. Or customer.

Ed Wasson: 30:43

Harmony and balance here, guys, harmony and balance.

Matt Marshall: 30:46

The last thing you commented on related to training your organization is there are large security focused organizations, like ASIS the GSX show the ISC west and ISC east shows. They're generally tended for people in the security market, but average citizens can walk through those type of events. Usually you can get away with a $99 ticket spend a day there and you'll find out some of the coolest stuff and meet some of the neatest people in the security industry. So that's another way in, of course you can get online training from, for all of that type of stuff. There's a couple of other key things that I would point out here. One is information provided to us that was almost every assailant follows. Okay. I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but here's a quick rundown There's that broad target selection and the intelligence and surveillance on different different targets. Then they have that specific target selection and there's a pre attack surveillance and planning. And then. the attack rehearsal And that can be something as simple as I showed you the snapshot of the video that we had the privilege of seeing of the assailant for the Stoneman Douglas school shooting. And he was in his backyard acting out what it would look like for him to hold a person down in execution style with his gun. He's not shooting. He's just acting out the scenario. So he is actually rehearsing what he's going to do. And somebody filmed him doing this. So every single one of them go through this process. And there could be different time spans for that process. It could take a year, it could take two months. It could take a couple of days. But they all go through that process. There's this term, all of these are what all that, that process leading up to is what's called left of bang or what they, these presenters referred to as left of bang. Bang being the day of the event that it occurs. So this is really when we'd like to intercede as much as possible before people get into harm's way or are subjected to the harm.

Ed Wasson: 32:57

And this is where we get into trying to look for all those early warning indicators, right?

Matt Marshall: 33:03

That's exactly right. I'm not going to go through the whole list but there's a lot of those like increasing belligerence they've got this fascination with weaponry, they're hypersensitive to criticism. They're getting a little more violent or they're, even exploring some suicidal thoughts. And one of the very important points that the FBI guys wanted to make is these are all first or second amendment rights. Right. And just see a person is increasing their belligerence and then go arrest them and put them in jail. You can't see a person that's obsessed with weapons, the last couple of years because of COVID and other things I've been obsessed with weapons. So if somebody just used that as an identity, I would be in jail. If that were a possibility, but that's a protected right. The way he said it is, we're looking for clusters of these types of things. So if you see all of those things and then somebody is starting to act out like killing animals or , hurting people around them then you start to go in strong with some mental health support.

Ed Wasson: 34:05

Yeah. Matt, this is where we had previously a little bit of discussion on just exactly how many indicators and warnings do you have. I when I spoke to law enforcement and a few years ago on Homeland security and homegrown, violent extremists, some of the things are pretty glaring. I mean the next thing, you know, they've converted to Islam or something, and they're making videos where they've got the Al Qaeda banner behind them and things like this, but you're going to have the FBI on you, like a cheap suit. Like you said, these are basic freedoms and rights and they haven't broken a law yet. However, sometimes these guys make it pretty obvious that they're in a planning and preparation phase. And do they have the training and equipment that you put it all together? And there's obvious intent because the FBI has made arrests in the past where it's not as much of a potential active shooter, mass shooter, but they've considered potential. Terrorism, for example, a few years ago, they arrested at Hezbollah operative in New York city. They were watching this guy and he was just surveilling potential targets. He didn't have a lot of these early warning indicators, but they still made an arrest on him for potential terrorism. There's another guy that's a former Marine. And I believe he was in the coast guard and he was buying a whole bunch of weapons if I remember right. Whole bunch of ammo. And then he came out on his social media and he said AOC, Nancy, Pelosi, all these are the things. Next thing you know, that guy is rolled up. There's a certain line you cross where not only are you going to get the interest of federal law enforcement surveillance and monitoring of you, but you're probably going to get arrested that unfortunately, if it's a potential mass shooting type thing, he haven't crossed that line yet.

Matt Marshall: 36:15

I think that's probably one of the one of the most frustrating things about these , active shooter type of events, for instance, the fella down in Florida that shot up the school there were six or seven different scenarios where the police were called on him and he had to go into talking to the counselor but it didn't seem to fix the problem. It almost seemed to exacerbate the problem it made it worse in a way. If you're not going about it correctly, then it has the potential of causing even worse problems. But we as individuals, and as business owners, I think the best thing that we can do is report it. If we see something that looks strange out of the ordinary

Ed Wasson: 36:57

Matt, there was also the San Bernardino shooters and those guys had all kinds of red flags. Law enforcement may not have been as up on this as the actual witnesses and victims and targets, but obviously there was something going on there.

Matt Marshall: 37:15

Now the San San Bernardino that's the husband and wife, and eventually they made it back home and they were killed in their home or something.

Ed Wasson: 37:23

They actually had a little bit of an exchange of fire yeah. Between the, the initial site. And I believe they were trying to get home or something like that. But those guys San Bernardino and the local authorities responded in my opinion extremely well

Matt Marshall: 37:45

yeah. Okay. So we're shifting gears into the action portion preparation action recovery. You're in the middle of the situation you're at the market you're at work you hear popping off of sounds okay, this is an event occurring. There's just a couple of areas that I wanted to talk about, first of all is situational awareness. And I think you and I have talked about this a couple of different times. In this case, it is personal situational awareness. You are always aware of what's happening around you and there's a graph I have that talks about these five levels of awareness, starting at the bottom your comatose, right? I'm not paying attention to anything you're drunk off your butt

Ed Wasson: 38:29

you could be, even like asleep

Matt Marshall: 38:31

zero awareness. And then as you start moving up, you got tuned out. You're watching TV, somebody's sitting there you see them all the time zombies walking around with their cell phones. They're looking down, watching Tik TOK videos instead of paying attention to anything around them, that's tuned out. And then there's this level of relaxed awareness. And I think that's the area that we, as informed individuals should live in on a regular basis. You're not super stressed out about what's happening around you're not constantly targeting different people, you're not a Jason Bourne spy kind of guy observing every single person, but you you've got an awareness that there's a potential then there's focused awareness. And once you get to the top of the pyramid it's high alert awareness. You are actively monitoring every single person, vehicle building I feel what happens in the middle of a scenario like this is if you're following this logic of relaxed awareness while you're at work, while you're at the market, and then something occurs, you immediately go straight up the pyramid, right. And you start to go to high alert as quickly as possible

Ed Wasson: 39:43

in general,

Matt Marshall: 39:44

I'm just saying in general, some people freeze and they never get to high alert. They just go, okay, I'm screwed.

Ed Wasson: 39:51

And you know what, Matt, I think there's some people that will say this can be trained. And there's some people that say a situation happens and you can't train to respond to it. And I would say the latter is in my opinion, wrong, you can be trained to a certain level of preparedness and awareness. And it's little things I can tell you right now what my pace count is. And there's only so many times that you're going to do a land navigation course and mark, you know hiking or marching before in any given condition, you have a rough understanding of what your pace count is. Shooting type training. There's only so many scenarios, situational shooting that you can go through. There's only so much operational experience that you can have as a police officer military or something like that. And the, the law enforcement guys, they say they had a lot of cops develop a sixth sense and they say, I can't really explain it. I can't articulate it yeah you actually can. In your training and experience, you can articulate this, this, and this were off that day. You were already on a call. You knew that this call was of this nature. You're starting to respond. Yes. So right away, you're starting to get into more heightened awareness. You're on a traffic stop. This guy ain't acting write something you can articulate. It's not, it is a kind of a sixth sense. It is kind of training and experience that you can. Train yourself, even if you're not working in that kind of situation to get the experience consistently all the time

Matt Marshall: 41:31

This is great. There's this visual representation of this decision-making process that this way that this guy shared with us. And, and I think it's to what you were just talking about. That is B A D baseline, plus anomaly equals decision. So if you're at a traffic stop, you're already at a heightened level of awareness. You're approaching a vehicle, your baseline, you've done this hundreds of times, or you've done this a number of times, your baseline is I'm approaching a vehicle. A person is nervous. I know they're going to be nervous. They all are right. I know if I'm approaching at night, a woman's going to be a different nervous than a man would be. So you have this baseline. The anomaly is that person's hands are down around their hand, and they're not nervous. Just perfectly, still, that's an anomaly. The decision then. Hi alert. Cause I'm aware something is not right in this field of view. Now the example the guy gave was at the 4 0 5 in, in LA, which is completely packed full of cars. You see a picture of thousands of cars that go on for miles, right? The anomaly being the same picture of the 4 0 5 with no cars on it. Right. And a car parked off to the side of the road and my decision being, I'm not getting on that highway. I'm going to get off this highway as fast as I can cause something's wrong The point is we all have this ability, this the sense, and it can be trained into us. You will never be able to train yourself to understand what it will be like if, if you're with your child. Oh. Or if you're with your wife in the middle of a scenario and they get shot.

Ed Wasson: 43:20

Let me segue into that real quick, Matt. It was about six years ago, my brother and sister-in-law niece were living in Albuquerque at a red light intersection. They had vehicles all around them, so they couldn't move and they had to witness an Albuquerque police vehicle fleeing one way with some dude, a civilian shooting at pursuing cops with automatic, AK 47. This guy was apparently crazy. The cops got called on him. Cops got there. He has an AK 47. I don't know how, but eventually by some fire and maneuver, he ended up getting in one of the Albuquerque police vehicles and leading them on a chase, ends up crashing into the corner convenience station, right in front of my sister-in-law and her niece at which time police surrounded him. And they witnessed the police smoke this guy they're stuck at this light. You can't prepare for that. That's the harsh reality of what's going on in the world.

Matt Marshall: 44:34

Here's the differentiator you're not preparing for that type of thing. When we're talking about training for active shooter events, you're not preparing for some horrible event. What you're preparing for are the sounds, the actions. I'm not saying to completely desensitize yourself to the blood and gore, but to recognize that there will be blood. And to not completely freak out. So the other way of handling that, and we'll talk about this real quickly in the recovery. Part of it is being able to provide first aid and medical care, being able to perform, stop the bleed with a tourniquet, the proper way there's different things that we can do so that we can see what it looks like for a leg to have a hole through it. And us being able to wrap it and put a tourniquet on it, or for somebody to have a chest wound and put a chest seal on somebody. and still be coherent. You can train for it but you never know how you're going to react. So all you can hope for is that with all the training that you'll react more positively and have the mental capacity to respond well and recover faster.

Ed Wasson: 45:45

That's what it's all about.

Matt Marshall: 45:47

The last thing I wanted to talk about in this section in the section of action is OODA loops. Just to share real briefly about it air force, jet pilot from back in the mid seventies he wrote a book on OODA loops and OODA being this process, this constant cycle that we go through in a challenging scenario to get us home safely. So that OODA is observe orient. Decide and act, and it's not like it's one cycle and you go through that cycle and you're good. It's a constant circular motion that goes, and it's overlapping. So you're constantly observing oriented, decide, act, observe, orient, decide act. And then eventually you would get to this point where realize that the assailant themselves are probably going through that same type of OODA loop. They don't know what it means. They're observing, they're orienting themselves, they're deciding and they're shooting. As they're walking through the, the building, the house of worship, the school, they're constantly unknowingly going through this OODA loop. So you, as a person, challenging them, your objective could and should be to OODA your way into intercepting their OODA loop. To stop them from making a decision and acting. You need to break their OODA loop and intercept it. If it means use the OODA loop to get you the hell out, then get out, if you home safe, that's it. That's all you're responsible for you and the ones that you care about. Right. So run, hide, fight. You've probably heard that a thousand times when it comes to active shooters, but there's a new one. There is a new one. I don't, I'm not going to say it's new it's just a different way of looking at it. So run, hide, fight. You got anyone who's gone through any sort of active shooter probably went through the run, hide fight. There's even a movie about run, hide, fight by the our friends at daily wire Although the history of it is good. Many people, when they hear run, hide fight, they think that's a progression. They should first run, then they should hide and then they should fight. And that's not the way it works. It could be. I need to fight now. It could be okay. I'm on a run so that I can hide.

Ed Wasson: 48:17

You can try to run and hide up until you're cornered, then you've got a fight. You have no choice.

Matt Marshall: 48:24

Yeah. Right. And you think about the mental side of that you're running. So you're a victim, right? In your mind, you're thinking I'm a victim. I'm running, I'm scared you hide. So you're a victim and you're hiding and you're scared. And then all of a sudden you're going to break that somehow mental block of I'm a victim, and you're going to attack this, shooter, and that's just wrong. It's just not going to happen. A person who is in this victim mentality, they don't just click and change Now there is a different approach that I I've mentioned a couple of times and that's to avoid, deny and defend all active, adjectives on what you're doing in the event. Right I'm actively avoiding this scenario, whether it means I'm avoiding away or avoiding toward I'm avoiding, then I'm denying someone access to the room that I'm in. So I put a belt on the door handle and I lock it shut. Actively denying them the ability to get to me or the people that I care about. So avoid deny. And then the last one is to defend, right. An active means , of yes. Attacking that individual, but basically you are defending yourself and all three of these are active involving you in the scenario. It's a subtle difference in the words that we're using and if you're constantly running through your OODA loop, And initially avoiding the assailant. You, OODA the situation to the point where you're denying the assailant, any access to you or the ones that you care about, and then as you're needed, you've OODA'd your way through the situation that there's no other alternative than to cause extreme violence on this person then you go.

Ed Wasson: 50:18

You might need to buy yourself a couple of seconds to get from point a to point B. So you're behind cover and hopefully that saves your life. But when push comes to shove, if you've made that decision and you're at that final fight or flight step, you need to make sure that you grab everything you've got. And you've got to make it a very violent, shocking force of action that you're going to take because that's once you've made the decision to fight. Now I'm not saying go haywire on this guy. Hopefully your, our, our audience is preparing themselves to fight a little bit too, because running at this guy going

Matt Marshall: 50:58

Might scare them a little bit, but it's not going to work,

Ed Wasson: 51:03

You want to train yourself to be able to physically confront somebody if you have to as it's a sad reality, but it's reality. You, you're going to have to learn how to fight a little bit.

Matt Marshall: 51:14

Ed for the audience, could you give a very quick rundown of the difference between concealment and cover?

Ed Wasson: 51:22

That one's easy, so there's two concepts out there, guys, concealment and cover. This is something they harp on very strongly in basic training in the military infantry type schools, all types of other small unit tactics, CQB, SWAT and law enforcement. There's difference between cover and concealment. Concealment means that you're just not in sight. You could just be wearing camouflage clothing and maybe a ghillie suit or something, and you're in the bushes. Although you're harder to see once you're seen, you don't have any cover. You don't have any protection from let's say a firearm. Cover means you're actually around the corner of a building where it's pretty solid brick, concrete structure, you're behind the front wheel and engine block of a vehicle. Those things provide you actual cover from bullets coming your way.

Matt Marshall: 52:26

One of the things that I learned when I went through some, some gun safety I went with a police department and I was fortunate enough to get involved with this small group of people, small town in New Mexico. And one of the things that I never knew, but it made all the sense in the world is cover because you see it in the movies all the time. You see the police, they all pull up and they open the doors and they all stand there right there in the doorway. And they're like holding their guns in the, in the window, completely false. most guns, at least within a certain distance will go right through that door. Cause it's just a very thin layer of metal. And it'll go right through that. That's why Ed, that's why police pull up a certain way to when they pull you over is so that they know my quickest cover is just three steps back behind the engine block.

Ed Wasson: 53:14

And there's a psychological impact to it as well. One cop at the law enforcement academy was telling us he was involved in a shooting where the person, the subject, he was confronting, had a firearm on him. And he ended up drawing out his firearm and grabbing, I think he said it was the, the trash can in the kitchen. And he held up the trash can in front of him and he was able to fire and he ended up wounding the suspect, getting him down. And when he asked the suspect later, why didn't you fire at me? He said for a couple of seconds there, my brain said he's got a shield in front of him. This guy OODA looped in and he bought himself a second for him to draw out his weapon because. The guy was drawn down on him. He had him dead to rights. And the first thing he thought of is trashcan.

Matt Marshall: 54:11

Yeah. Well, it's, it's interesting because in some of these more advanced gun safety training one of the first things they'll teach is get off target. If they've got you dead to rights, get off target. I remember when I was going through some self-defense training, things like that, but the most immediate thing you can do when a guns pointed at your head is you've got your hands up, right? You're in this, in this position. It's an instant to just get a hair off, that's all you have to do. Cause they take that first shot. Their natural thing is there they've hands on the trigger. They're going to pull that trigger. Right. But if you're off like this it might miss. And that's the whole point is you just want to get to the point where you're into a position where you can start moving and causing damage on them. Right. Because they intend damage on you, right. Gun to your head.

Ed Wasson: 55:02

I actually know two or three who've been in a similar situation and they put the gun, they put their hand in front of their face and they got their hands shot and got shot in the face. All. Yeah. It's hard to think about that when you got a gun pointed right at your face though,

Matt Marshall: 55:18

There's no way, you know how you're going to react in these types of situations.

Ed Wasson: 55:22

They actually train this in the academy and other schools in the military, you're training with a blue gun and you're training on you're unarmed and you're disarming somebody with a gun to your head facing or behind you. And it sounds stupid and you see it in a movie, but they train this way. They train, train, train, train, train, and it actually works.

Matt Marshall: 55:47

That's a really good point. And that's one of the things that we, in our concealed carry training, we use the laser guns, the ones that had the little laser inside of them and targets and so we learned how to pull quickly, how to shoot we were using actual guns that worked as if they were normal guns. After one day in this type of scenario and I became so much more accurate with my shooting. Because with laser targets I'm able to know where I'm shooting, what I'm shooting at. I'm able to draw it was really excellent training, so. Last thing, we need to go into before parting shots, the recovery portion. Okay. Not to get too personal, but have you ever been through any violent type of scenarios and in particular, what the feeling is like afterwards?

Ed Wasson: 56:39

Not a mass shooter, but other violent things where there's certain recovery type considerations. In my experience overall, I mean, I've gone through PTSD counseling as well. There's some things you, once you've seen it or experienced it, you're just never going to get it out of your head. So there's, there's certain things that you just have to learn how to live with. First of all, immediately after something happens you're probably gonna feel certain ways of certain things of the immediate adrenaline dump and then the exhaustion that occurs right after that and your extremities, your fingers they might get ice cold and you might have actual difficulty having a grip because with your adrenaline dump in the immediate occurrence of something that one moment of, oh, shit factor what happens is your blood goes from your extremities to your core after something happens and you've, you, you get through it. And we're talking about more, not immediately after, but you're talking about the recovery. You're gonna feel like there are different people feel different things I think, but you could feel this huge sigh of relief. You can finally exhale. Now you might see some, some victims that didn't make it. And you might, at some point in time start feeling survivors guilt. There's a, there's a variety of different emotions that you can go through when you're in the. After action and recovery portion of a critical incident like this.

Matt Marshall: 58:26

I can only imagine. I mean, the worst I've probably ever, ever experienced are more like fights when you've been in a fight with somebody and there is that adrenaline dump, they always talk about, on talk about it on UFC, where there's this lactic acid builds up in people's muscles and they get so pumped up leading up to an event. And then afterward I can't even lift my arms. That's this chemical reaction that happens to the body after the event. So there is a process of recovery from a physical and chemical basis. Now, again, I feel like there's a portion of that that can be trained out. They focused on two areas. One is providing medical aid and being trained, being fully trained. And every year, every year come back and retrain yourself. They only, they only require you to be first aid certified every two years. I personally put myself through first aid training, CPR, AED Naloxone. So there's certain training that I personally go through every year, because I know I'm going to forget right. I would absolutely recommend it for anyone, attend as much training in first aid and they're, most of them are free, it's just like a weekend. So spend a weekend doing this and you're good for a year. If people can become more trained on that, stop, the bleed is another big one, super simple, super, super simple, direct pressure, learn how to tie on a tourniquet. No, you can't use a tourniquet on the neck. They're really easy to understand, but if you can do them, you'll recognize even the good ones they'll have a portion of a leg just a little kind of dummy leg and they'll have a little squirt of blood, red liquid coming out of it. And if you put the tourniquet on, right, yeah. Then you're good. It'll also what the, the other cool thing about this is blood spurting out. That means it's getting super slippery and it's really hard to get that tourniquet on correctly and tight if it's super slippery. So you start to learn and realize I'm not going to freak out at the sight of blood.

Ed Wasson: 1:00:46

I'm really basic first aid type stuff, especially with really very, very simple, easy acronyms that you can learn. So you can learn the types of bleeding. Then, if it's bright, red and spurting, its arterial. There's types of wounds. There's there's an acronym for types of wounds. There's an acronym for stop the bleeding. Start the breathing, protect the wound, treat for shock. There's all kinds of very basic things that you can have rote memorize that way. Boom is something as soon as something happens, it's easier for you to respond well and recover faster.

Matt Marshall: 1:01:22

I'd never heard the term you probably have, but TAC med, you can get TAC med trained , in a weekend as well, which is just tactical medicine.

Ed Wasson: 1:01:31

Yeah. I'm sure there's a variety of courses that even civilians can take that are related to TAC med. And if you're saying there's one that you can take on a weekend, I would suggest that you take at least a 40 hour basic first aid course first, and then do your TACMed. Otherwise, if you're going to do it all at once, I would say TAC med probably requires at least 40 hours of training because you're combining a tactical scenario, possibly even shooting. Oh wow. With medical first response or first date.

Matt Marshall: 1:02:05

Oh, so you don't want to be learning all this stop the bleed stuff. There's no way if you don't know that already, you're not going to go into TACMed and know what you're doing necessarily.

Ed Wasson: 1:02:16

Well, I mean, when you say TACMed, I'm thinking, number one, you're going to be applying first aid, but it's going to be in a tactical situation where you might actually have to shoot and maneuver your way to the person that you need to provide first aid to. And then while you're providing the first aid to them, if you're getting shot at still. The harsh reality of it is you're not going to be able to provide first aid to this person if you're dead. So you're going to have to, you're going to have to push this off to the side for a second and neutralize your threat and then apply there. There's whole courses on that in the military. I know if there's something in the civilian world that's similar and you're calling it TAC med there might be different levels of it to where I would suggest you go through at least a 40 hour first aid first, and then go through that TAC med. And then you're going to be able to put those tools together a better I think.

Matt Marshall: 1:03:17

Yeah. Yeah. Now again, the TAC med is more of a if you feel lead. To get more advanced all of the other stuff we listed previous, the stop, the bleed, the AED, the CPR, and first aid, Naloxone training, even these are all super basic things that you can learn and you can learn a lot of it online. You can't learn the physical applying tourniquets and things like that necessarily. But a lot of times what they'll have is like you said, they'll have this, this 40 hour training that you can do online. And then you show up for a Saturday morning or a Saturday afternoon you go through the physical training to get your final certification, exactly. It gets a little card and you're good

Ed Wasson: 1:03:59

because you have to demonstrate to them the CPR portion of chest compressions, airway, breathing, circulation doing the Heimlich maneuver to possibly dislodge something. You should be able to do a nasal pharyngeal if required, you should be able to do at least a tourniquet and apply other dressings, you should have to physically demonstrate several these, possibly up to and including basically sticking somebody with an IV if they need an IV.

Matt Marshall: 1:04:34

Yeah. there's so many different things that, we could go into. So the, the second thing was is mental health and that's immediately, like you were just mentioning there's there's immediate effects like shock. But then there's also long-term effects like PTSD, anxiety, depression

Ed Wasson: 1:04:52

I think training can help alleviate or mitigate some of it, but you still have situations that when you actually see it, it's so unsettling, maybe not shocking, but unsettling. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. And it just, it just sticks in your head. You can't get it out of your head. It's not maybe something you're going to think about every day, but when you do think about it, you're gonna have those days where you're struggling and you're to want to hit the bottle or something like that. So there's a lot of people that just start, they start resorting to alcohol. And for a lot of our gen X-ers the reality of it is that you're most likely gonna see an elderly man basically just pass away on the toilet that occurs more frequently than people realize a very, you're probably going to see it sooner or later in your life. However, when we're trying to talk about training and preparing for mass shooting scenarios. Planning and preparing and training yourself to provide that first aid. Training it helps, but when you actually see a real person there's civilian resources out there for PTSD counseling. So there's a lot of resources out there for you guys, if you endured or experienced something like that you can reach out there. I'll try to research it and, and let people know.

Matt Marshall: 1:06:19

It seems to make sense that even if you feel like you're okay. Yeah. Just sign up for a little bit of counseling, even if it's just a couple of weeks just sign up for some counseling so that you can talk through the scenario. Yeah. Get it clear in your mind what happened, how you responded and not start to feel that survivor's guilt. I think it makes sense to do that. Just as a default reaction to any significant event like this.

Ed Wasson: 1:06:49

Right. And that's a big thing you said about being okay. A lot of people forget. I know some people say it till they're sick about hearing it but it's okay to not be okay.

Matt Marshall: 1:07:01

I guess one more thing, I didn't really talk about it too much. There was one point that was brought up and that's back up in the action portion and it kind of bleeds into recovery. And that is, there's the avoid, deny, defend, there's run, hide fight. There's a fourth part of each of those options. That's tell. That's why I think the avoid deny defend works much better because you're actively doing something and interacting with all of the different players, the assailant, the other people who are involved, the building, the cars driving by. So if you're, if you're being active and you're observing and using your OODA loop, you also have the ability of capturing a lot more information. If you're just Mindlessly a victim and you're running, or hiding from something. You have no clue what's going on around you. So you're a useless victim at that point, when the law enforcement tries to come in behind or after the scenario, speaking of recovery, and they try to figure out what really happened, a person who has their wits about them they can then be more effective in telling law enforcement what actually happened. Exactly. Or they are at least they have a clearer understanding of what happened. Yeah, law enforcement is trained to try to get better details from you during an interview of witnesses, but, help us help you. Going back to that, Jason Bourne scenario he's sitting in the diner, he's asking that girl, I just don't know how to explain how it is that I, I can tell that guys Eastern European, by the way, he's smoking a cigarette and he's, he's about 265 pounds of chewed bubble gum, and probably can't handle one. Yeah. And I can look in the mirror and read that license plate over there and I know that this altitude, I can run this far dead out without breaking a sweat, and they do train you in a lot of that stuff, but they also train you to triage it. And there's a lot of stuff going on around you, but let's say, and Jason Bourne scenario, he should be able to say that dude right there. I know just by looking at him, he's from an Eastern European block country. He's probably former military and that tattoo on his arm. I want to know if that I'm trying to get the details of that tattoo. Cause I bet it's some type of Eastern European special forces or mafia tattoo. Yeah. Does he have blonde hair, long hair? Does he have, a flat top what color of eyes as you have, what color, what type and color of clothes does he have? Height, weight. Those are the kind of details as you're triaging. I think that's a big part of, there will be this point in time when you'll be interviewed, not just by the police that are on scene, but probably by detectives afterward and the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that want to come in and understand what actually happened. The only way they're going to know how to avoid this type of events in the future, and to make sure more people get home safe after these type of events is if they can collect correct information. Okay. Let's go into parting shots. We're almost done, ed. So do you want to go first or you want me to.

Ed Wasson: 1:10:21

I will. I'll my mind is going to be really brief guys as a final thought on this episode that Matt and I have talked to. With all love and, and respect due to all of our first responders and especially the law enforcement, federal law enforcement out there. As we, Matt and I talked about this, there's a whole bunch of indicators and warnings and they can recur and it's still not going to, put this potential threat on the radar of, of federal law enforcement is not necessarily an FBI law enforcement or intelligence failure if something happens. So my key takeaway from all of this is that in my personal humble opinion, based on these trainings and experiences and discussions, is that you should not put all of your hope, faith and trust in some external entity to come in with a Cape and fly in and rescue you and save the day. You need to be trained and prepared yourself. And that's goes to the core raison d'etre or our whole reason that Matt and I are doing this type of stuff is so that you can be better prepared and respond will and recover faster.

Matt Marshall: 1:11:44

Yeah. For my parting shots, I just wanted to impart a couple of different things. Recall the acronym used for the presentation That was preparation action recovery and the for the preparation piece, a couple of key points and understand that it can happen in your place of business or house of worship. As it's happened to many other people, commercial is the primary target, of these active shooters. So do all you can to make yours a place that is more of a hard target instead of a soft target make sure to prepare yourself and respond in the best possible ways, get trained on those, those things. We just talked about. Stop the bleed first aid, AED, whatever you can learn, how to apply a tourniquet properly, you can screw it up. Established ways to train your mind for those stressful situations, like getting actual weapons training buy a gun. You can do it in almost every state. And then get drained on it for sure. Go to the gun range on a regular basis. First time I ever went to a gun range, an indoor gun range. It's fricking loud in there and that's with noise, canceling headphones, it is loud. And you'll be able to start understanding the different sounds of different types of weapons and, and become again, I hate to use the term, but desensitized to it. So you're able to react and work well under those scenarios, all of these, just to reduce risk and, and prepare you better. For the action section. I suspect most in our listener group are already familiar with aspects of the OODA loop. If you're from military law enforcement, whatever it might be observe, orient, decide and act, but keep in mind. As I mentioned earlier, it's not just your OODA loop, it's inter intercepting their OODA loop so that you can act appropriately and perhaps take out your adversary as, as you might need to. Yeah, they're going through that same cycle of thinking and the more you can interfere the better. And then of course, that we talked about the different levels of awareness. Try if you're in public to maintain that level of relaxed awareness so that you can quickly move up into a higher alert. It's it's actually, once you get used to it, it's actually not that difficult to do you, you seem a little antisocial. I think sometimes I know I do too. When my wife and I are walking through a mall and my, my head is on a swivel and I'm constantly watching and observing and seeing different people and how they're acting. It's, I'm relaxed. I'm totally casual doing it, but I am aware as well. So definitely recommend that you

Ed Wasson: 1:14:40

should have seen us in Egypt. I was like,

Matt Marshall: 1:14:42

I can't imagine it and then of course, the consider using the avoid deny defend and then be able to tell afterwards, so speaking of recovery, get yourself some training as we, as we talked about earlier. Last thing I would talk about is many, especially those who have no training, a nd therefore no clue. They may think of training as scary. It was actually brought up in the presentation. I went to that. A lot of people don't go through the training because they think their kids are going to get scared or that they're going to walk out of there, scared to death. And, and they clearly don't understand the purpose of the training, because most of these people who are from law enforcement or who are from the military, they do not want to scare people. They don't want to fill people with fear and anxiety. Most assuredly their purpose is, is to bring up that level of awareness. So people are more confident in responding in these types of scenarios, no fear. It's more confidence. So with that said, we appreciate our audience. Thank you very much for listening. Really enjoy bringing this type of information to you all. So thanks for continually letting us be a part of your day. Anything else, ed.

Ed Wasson: 1:16:00

Just a huge, thanks to everybody. That's listening to us. And all of the support we get and thank you, Matt, for all the opportunities

Matt Marshall: 1:16:09

all right, until next time always remember, respond well and recover faster. This is Matt Marshall signing off

Ed Wasson: 1:16:17

ed Wasson, signing off.