Terrorist Attacks - Active Shooters
Terrorist attacks get a lot of attention in the United States, perhaps more than their danger would warrant. A lot of that is who’s giving the message.
Ever since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, Americans have taken steps to combat Islamic extremists. But a strange thing happened over the last 20 years.
A June 2020 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reported that over 25 years of domestic terrorism incidents, the majority of attacks and plots have come from far-right attackers. The trend has accelerated in recent years, with this sector responsible for about 66% of attacks and plots in 2019, and 90% of those in 2020. The next most potentially dangerous group has been “religious extremists,” the majority “Salafi jihadists inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda,” while the number planned by the far left has reduced to a minute fraction since the mid-2000s.
So much for the fear-mongering that’s been drummed up against Antifa or Black Lives Matter.
In October 2020, the Department of Homeland Security released the “Homeland Threat Assessment,” a report detailing various domestic threats to US national security. It states that, out of all domestic terror attacks resulting in lethal threats to life between 2018 and 2019, “WSEs [white supremacist extremists] conducted half of all lethal attacks (8 of 16), resulting in the majority of deaths (39 of 48)”.
-Source: Wikipedia - Terrorism in the United States
Those numbers may seem a little surprising, but those are specifically terrorist-related events; what about active or mass shooters?
The FBI documented 277 active shooter incidents between the years 2000 and 2018. There were 884 deaths (a little more than 46 per year) and 1,546 people wounded.
That’s 2,430 people whose lives were changed forever. But on a yearly basis, it’s a tiny percentage compared to the approximately 33,000 people that die each year from firearms in the United States.
That means for you, the odds of being caught in an active shooter situation are minimal. But that doesn’t mean the risk is zero. Below are some common-sense steps you can take from NBC News, Ready.gov and the American Red Cross to get to safety.
How To Survive A Mass Shooting | Better | NBC News
Preparation - Survival
Click Here for information on what to do from the United States government website, Ready.gov.
Click Here for the Red Cross Terrorism Safety Tips.
Click Here to download a PDF file with information on what to do from the United States government website, Ready.gov.
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This information is presented to make people aware of the larger world around them. If you can prepare for something as devastating as this, you're much more likely to be ready for smaller disruptions. Be aware and prepare.
6/6/2020
Updated 4/15/2021
Updated 7/1/2021
