The sentinel challenge today for both Security Professionals and Crime Prevention Professionals is to develop strategies and procedures to prevent the next mass shooting. Indeed "Active Shooter" and "Run-Hide-Fight" classes have become a cottage industry in the security-law enforcement-crime prevention professions. As we move ahead to address what appears at times to be an insurmountable problem, we need to include and focus on one reality that is absent in far too many trainings and classes. There is a very large elephant in the room that is seldom mentioned or acknowledged. This is the huge and tragic correlation between mass shootings and domestic-family violence. Consider the following:
1. From 2009 to 2016 in more than half of the mass shootings the shooters killed intimate partners or other family members.
2. Women in the United States are 16 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high income countries.
3. Nearly one million women living in the United States today have been shot, or shot at by an intimate partner.
4. Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women's Center Speech Project said "There's absolutely no doubt that the practice of violence within a home, in an intimate setting, with people that theoretically the aggressor loves, opens the floodgates to public violence."
The enduring reality we have to address is that domestic violence and mass shootings are co-joined twins that tear at the fabric of American life on a daily basis. So, what are some constructive and proactive strategies that we can adopt as we move ahead to counter this growing problem? securitymagazine.com