I've learned through trial and error, prayer when I'm smart enough to invest in it, exercise, rest and nutrition to fairly well manage stress, the insidious and loathsome killer of people's health and relationships.
Dave Grossman, a man I'm honored to call friend and mentor, is known for among other things his pointed discussions on "stress inoculation" the term for those prophylactic measures law enforcement officers take to prevent degraded performance when the Moment of Truth arrives.
I've twice graduated from Grossman's Bulletproof Mind seminar. (If you've been exposed to the good colonel, you know you're a different cop after eight hours locked in an auditorium with the guy; in no way does one simply "attend" the event.) I've also availed myself of Grossman's writings most germane to the law enforcement community, On Killing and On Combat.
I can declare with certainty, lessons learned from Lt. Col. Grossman helped me navigate the fog of war which cloaked the killing fields inside Von Maur on the morning of December 5, 2007 in Omaha, Nebraska. Here's an excerpt of what I had to say in a LawOfficer.com feature piece on my experience:
"Everywhere I looked, I saw and smelled evidence of a monster on the loose. Store employees frozen under display cases. The first gunshot victim, mortally wounded, surrounded by 7.62mm shell casings. The smell of gunfire hanging in the air, reminiscent of the firecrackers I enjoyed as a kid. Christmas music played, eerily juxtaposed with the blaring fire alarm someone pulled to call for help. I became conscious of my increased respiration. Moderately asthmatic, I was puffing a bit as I relayed information on my portable radio to incoming responders."
Now one year removed from the deadliest spree-shooter incident in a U.S. shopping mall, I've come to the following conclusion: mass murderers like Robbie Hawkins aren't a law enforcement problem. That's right. Cops might just as well tote mops and buckets to clean up the gore pile as brandish ARs and slug guns in an active shooter environment. We will continue to be a day late and dollar short in our response to these calls, just as we have been nearly every time before and since Von Maur.
Of course, there will be the anecdotal off-duty cop bravely engaging a shooter before he can inflict further harm, and there may come the day a nearby uniform grunt will expeditiously dispatch a gunman with his or her patrol carbine. Thank God for that.
Experience tells us these are not the normal way of things, however. There aren't enough off-duty cops carrying enough hardware to stem the tide, and even a two-to-three minute response time by on-duty personnel is generally not going to change the outcome of a social misfit's urban shooting gallery once he presses the start button.
Unless our nation is willing to accept the sight of tactical officers strolling to and fro in every public venue, and unless citizens have the stomach to bear the tax burden such extreme public safety measures will cost, "wolves" the term Dave Grossman uses to describe mutants like Robbie Hawkins will always be able to inflict preemptive blitzkrieg upon the citizenry.
Not our problem
So I'll say it again. Active shooters aren't a law enforcement problem. Not at the core anyway. The real battlefront lay not in the hallways of our schools and corridors of our shopping malls, but rather within the confines of our own homes and, when all else fails, within the purview of individual states' behavioral health and human services agencies.
I no longer seethe for Robbie Hawkins. I owe much of that release to my Christian faith, but nearly as important was my personal study of his life and the circumstances leading up to the morning he jungle-clipped 60 rounds of ammunition into an AK-47 and brought it to bear on Christmas shoppers before turning a cherry-red barrel on himself.
Robbie Hawkins' meager existence culminated in the destruction of eight lives, but the massacre was a long time in the making. As a child, Hawkins incubated in a miserable cauldron of drug and alcohol use, violent video games, domestic assault, sexual abuse and eventual abandonment. He like other shooters became the product of a toxic environment.
To be sure, Hawkins did the deed. I'm not letting him off the hook for that, but to view his rampage as just another violent crime to be addressed by rapid deployment of police resources is myopic at best. While law enforcement spent hundreds of hours breaking down the event and creating after-action reports and PowerPoint presentations, I'm not confident we've paid adequate attention to the circumstances surrounding Hawkins' sordid upbringing and the choices made by those persons charged with his early formation.
Yes, we need to equip motivated first responders. Yes, we must undertake reality-based training to prepare for the active shooter phenomena which promises to propagate, but in the final analysis these are only stopgap measures. The genesis of the problem lay elsewhere. It's a chicken v. egg thing, and for too long we've all been fixated on the chicken.
Pop culture and moral relativism are a cancer. Secularism contributes to the moral decay. Young people, especially young women, are sexualized rather than humanized. Babies are having babies, parents aren't parenting, and violent imagery in media and the entertainment industry desensitizes consumers of said imagery and devalues human life. This key factor, the steady diet of death being fed to our children, is what Lt. Col. Grossman has devoted his time to combating full-time since 1998.
The light at the end of the tunnel could be curriculum like Stanford Medical School's SMART program, proven to convince kids to turn off television, movies and (most importantly) video games. Everywhere this curriculum goes in, violence and bullying is cut in half, and test scores go up.
Violence and what breeds it in Western culture is one of the transcendent issues of our time. There will be replacements for Robbie Hawkins, and replacements for the replacements. Cops will continue to arrive too late in most instances. So we must get out in front of the problem.
The theater of battle has changed. It has less to do with badges and guns and more to do with the preservation of the nuclear family and re-invigoration the country's moral code. Law enforcement will always have an unsavory role in this war, but more times that not, it's "Game Over" before the radio call hits the airwaves.
May God bless the victims of Von Maur, their families, friends and co-workers.