With A Bit Of A Mind Flip

“An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.” – Harry Dean Stanton, “Repo Man”

I’m working on standing up the security team for my church, and part of that will be integrating The Complete Combatant’s Image-Based Decisional Drills (IBDD) into our training, as a way to get them to pre-visualize and pre-load their response to incidents that might require the help of the safety team. 

And right now, you’re probably thinking “Oh, he’s going to do a bunch of active shooter drills, because that’s what church security is all about!”

Wrong. 

Is an active shooter one of my concerns? Of course it is. What I’m mainly worried about, though, is medical emergencies, then property crime, then trespassers (including domestic disputes), upset and angry churchgoers, protestors inside and outside and finally, last but certainly not least, active shooters. Yes, the consequences of a shooter inside the church are absolutely horrid, but thankfully, those kinds of incidents are relatively uncommon compared to elderly church goer having a medical emergency in the service. 

In working with the IBDD cards, though, I realized that while they are a tremendous resource for the armed citizen, they’ll need some adaptation in order to be used with a safety team. Here’s what I’m talking about. One of the first slides in the presentation I use in my CCW classes states “As armed citizens, our mission is to avoid contact with the bad guys, but if contact is initiated and it turns violent, we need to thwart the desired outcome of the bad guy(s) by either breaking contact or stopping the threat by using an appropriate amount of force,” and for an armed citizen, that is 100% correct. 

However, for a safety team member, avoiding an incident isn’t really in our wheelhouse. De-escalating contact? Sure, absolutely. Not initiating contact? Well, not always. Sometimes we will need to step up. But avoiding contact just isn’t our thing, as other people are depending on us to keep them safe, and that means a different mindset, one that quite frankly is more in-tune with Col. Grossman’s talk about “sheepdogs.”

Now, am I embracing the sheepdog metaphor? No, not at all, it’s still out of whack, as the sheep obey the sheepdog because they think he’s a wolf, and are scared of them. What I understand now, though, is how that metaphor can be beguiling. In a VERY limited way, it’s now my job to run TO an incident, rather than avoiding it, and that changes things.