Justin Marston
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Founder & CEO
September 2, 2025
PART III: Reducing Gun Trauma by Reducing the Killing
September 3, 2025
This blog is part three in a series on reducing gun trauma in schools.
Injury and death increase trauma in school shootings:
- According to a scientific study at Northwestern University: “School shootings not only cost communities the lives of students and educators, but these devastating events can leave surviving students traumatized. A new study finds that the use of prescription drugs to treat mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety, increased by over 25% among youth living near fatal school shootings. Five and a half years later, the use of these medications remained high.”
- From a publication from researchers at Stanford University: ”… we estimate that more than 100,000 American children attended a school at which a shooting took place in 2018 and 2019 alone. While many students are physically unharmed, studies have consistently found consequences to their mental health, educational, and economic trajectories that last for years, and potentially decades, to come.”
- From the American Psychological Association: “The National Center for PTSD estimates that 28 percent of people who have witnessed a mass shooting develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and about a third develop acute stress disorder.”
- From the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: “For survivors of mass shootings, the mental and physical toll does not end when the shooting stops… Studies of children exposed to sudden, unexpected acts of mass violence have reported PTSD rates of up to 100 percent. The greater impact of mass shootings also extends to families, friends, and affected communities as a whole. When the 24-hour news cycle of the media covers these tragic events in a round-the-clock fashion, it leads to heightened levels of fear and decreased perceptions of safety across the country, regardless of proximity to the event.”
- In a YouGov survey of 10,000 US adults, summarized in Nature Mental Health, individual acts of gun violence were differentiated from mass shootings in which there were large numbers of victims and far greater press coverage: ”… the findings also emphasize the broader psychological toll of community-level exposure, suggesting that public health strategies must extend beyond individual victim support to include community-based mental health resources.
“Stop the Killing” is one of the key messages of the ALERRT Active Shooter Training course. It’s the responsibility of anyone who held up his or her hand to carry a badge to run at the shooter and confront him or her with lethal force. As a team at Campus Guardian Angel, we recently completed the base ALERRT training course in Boerne, Texas, and so I know firsthand that this is a high-intensity and error-prone training program.
How do you stop a gun violence incident in a school from turning into a mass shooting with many injured and killed? It’s all about response time.
Police Response Times
Associated Press coverage of the Parkland shooting revealed that Cruz anticipated how law enforcement would respond based on past mass shootings:
“I studied mass murderers and how they did it,” Cruz told Scott. “How they planned, what they got and what they used.” He learned to watch for people coming around corners to stop him, to keep some distance from people as he fired, to attack “as fast as possible” and, in the earlier attacks, “the police didn’t do anything.”
“I should have the opportunity to shoot people for about 20 minutes,” Cruz said.
According to research from Wayne University, the average police response time to a high-priority event is 10 minutes and 30 seconds. SWAT teams take even longer - 20 to 30 minutes in a large city, and 45 minutes in a smaller municipality. The FBI cites a median time of 3 minutes for active shooter events.
In the majority of cases cited in a New York Times article, the shooting was over before police arrived - 249 versus 184 (where the shooting ended after police arrived on scene).
The worst school shootings have all had longer police response engagement times - Columbine, Uvalde, Parkland, etc.
Physical Security
A lot of the physical security measures are no-brainers:
- Locks on doors make it difficult for shooters to gain access to potential victims, who are often hiding in place.
- Stronger interior doors with metal reinforced frames are another method to prevent shooters from entering classrooms.
- Ballistic film on windows (exterior and interior) can also prevent access to additional victims for a school shooter.
Schools should take these precautions, but there is often a law of diminishing returns - putting ballistic film on every window inside a high school is typically not economically viable. This fortress strategy can also make it harder for law enforcement to access the shooter, especially when responding officers are unaware of the location of the Knox box, or other on-site security capabilities.
Technology
So, what can we do with technology to reduce the time available for killing in a school shooting?
- Silent panic buttons from Centegix, Raptor and Stryker make it easier for a teacher or other staff members to call for law enforcement.
- AI-based gun detection technologies, such as ZeroEyes for video camera analysis and Flock Safety for audio analysis, can provide earlier warnings of a threat or event.
Both of these approaches can improve law enforcement response times and reduce the number of victims in a shooting.
The challenge with both is that they may only shave 10-15 seconds off the response time compared to simply calling 911, and we have heard from police officers that silent panic buttons can lose some of the context provided in a conversation with a 911 operator. If that changes the police response time from, say, five minutes to four minutes and 50 seconds, it’s likely that the shooting will still be over before law enforcement arrives.
Officers on Site
In Florida, Texas, and many other states, there is now a mandate to have an armed individual at the school, so he or she is already on site to engage the shooter immediately. Texas passed HB 3 after Uvalde, but added a Good Cause Exception at the last minute. Today, 55% of Texas school districts are not in compliance with the armed peace officer mandate.
The cost and lack of candidates have led many school districts towards arming teachers as guardians, with greatly varying training. Texas requires only a 16-hour ALERRT course to be a school guardian, whereas Florida requires a minimum of 144 hours of training. However, typical school guardian training involves hunkering down in place and protecting the people in the room the guardian is in by training the gun on the door - not engaging in close-quarters battle and hostage rescue.
Even in schools that have an armed peace officer (police officer or SRO) on site, many are very large, with high schools exceeding 350,000 square feet and campuses that span a quarter of a mile. To get there fast enough to be effective, the officer must be lucky - being in the right place at the right time - or it may still take him or her minutes to get to the shooter.
Another reality is that most schools have one or two officers max. This creates thousands of single points of failure (one at most schools), and in the worst school shootings, there often was a law enforcement presence on site - it just turned out to be ineffectual.
In the end, only a peace officer can arrest a suspect and remove him or her in handcuffs - but every officer we have spoken to would like any help he or she can get for what would be one of the most stressful moments of his or her life.
Collateral Damage
As anyone who has undergone ALERRT training will know, collateral damage can occur in both real events and in false alarms. ‘Blue on blue’ errors are a significant risk in the heat of the moment, and with lethal weapons can have lethal outcomes.
The rapid nature of school shooting events and rush to the scene increases the risk of errors, as does the fact that “everyone goes,” and many officers (as well as school guardians) may not be wearing a uniform. It is easy to miss the yellow sash of a school guardian or a law enforcement badge on someone’s belt when he or she is aiming a gun.
In 2010, the New York State Task Force on Police-on-Police Shootings published an in-depth analysis of blue-on-blue shootings. The report provides details of 26 police officer fatalities that occurred between 1981 and 2009 and indicates that near-miss situations occur more frequently than we realize. The report itself recognizes that some incidents likely go unreported.
Training is key, but avoiding high risk situations would be a better answer.
Drone-Enabled Law Enforcement
This is a category in which Campus Guardian Angel really shines. Our service brings together three key pillars as a force multiplier to law enforcement:
- Drones: We pre-stage drones with less lethal effects inside the school ahead of time and can then operate them from a central operations center. Our drones are the first technology-enabled option that can be used to hunt and pacify an active shooter in a school.
- Apps: We have reimagined emergency response with apps for our team and law enforcement, fusing intelligence (e.g., live security camera feeds) into hyper-realistic digital twins of each campus to improve situational awareness. Information is power, especially when every second counts.
- Team: Our operations teams at our Austin HQ are ready to jump into an event immediately and can take control of our drones, which are pre-staged in any school nationwide, in a few seconds. We have former special forces and SWAT operators who have spent their careers doing hostage rescue and hunting terrorists, as well as four of the top ten drone racing pilots in the nation.
There are many ways that we can reduce the killing in a school shooting:
- Better Intelligence: Our operations team in Austin has a clearer real-time picture of what’s happening across a school campus than law enforcement officers on-site. Guiding law enforcement to the threat faster and giving them decision dominance greatly increases the speed and efficacy of law enforcement first responders.
- Direct Action: Our goals are to respond within five seconds, be on the shooter within 15 seconds, and degrade or incapacitate within 60 seconds. This has meant that in joint exercises with law enforcement, we are often the first to the scene in a school shooting, getting there 1-2 minutes before law enforcement officers who are already on site. Our service is uniquely able to distract and degrade the shooter in those crucial seconds, denying him or her the ability to find and murder victims.
- Law Enforcement Teaming: Our drones are the perfect wingmen for first responders - we can cover every corner and classroom, allowing law enforcement officers to move and clear faster, as well as with improved safety. Some officers have compared our drones to a pack of highly trained police dogs that are already there on demand but are very low-maintenance and completely disposable.
- Reducing Collateral Damage Risk: Our drones are entirely disposable, allowing them to take risks in target evaluation that people should not take. Taking longer to decide whether to apply effects reduces the chance of collateral damage, and so do many training repetitions that our team conducts, as it is our core focus. In addition, if we make a mistake, we may have caused temporary discomfort (e.g. with pepper spray), but we have not killed someone - less lethal reducing that risk dramatically.
In all the school mass shootings we have studied, we believe that our less lethal drone service would have had a significant impact on the number of victims. And we are not alone - Max Schachter, whose son was murdered at Parkland, has also commented that we would likely have engaged the shooter earlier, so the shooter would not have had the opportunity to get to the second and third floors. Similarly, at Uvalde, there were multiple moments (parking lot, corridor, classroom) at which we would have engaged the shooter.
If the shooters at Parkland and Uvalde had killed no or a small number of victims, it is likely that the press coverage would have been greatly diminished, reducing both those directly impacted by trauma as well as trauma to the whole community more generally.
In the next blog in this series, we will look at how “Reducing the Dying” can also reduce trauma by reducing the number of people who die unnecessarily due to survivable wounds, but do not receive medical attention fast enough.
