A golf club across the street from the San Bernardino shootings became an emergency-response site. We all hope that’s as close as any industry property gets to an active-shooter situation. But we can’t stop at hope.
Like many of us, Vince Tracy remembers going under desks and out in the hallway to assume the “take shelter” position while in elementary school, as standard preparation for the threats that hung over our heads as children growing up during the Cold War.
Tracy brought up his memory of that as we discussed the bold step he’s taken at Town & Country Club to educate and train his staff about active-shooter situations and other forms of workplace violence (see “Reality Check”).
What he’s now exposing his staff to, Tracy quickly acknowledged, is potentially far more horrific and real than what was explained to us about the “Reds” (if it was explained at all) as we followed our teachers’ instructions. But his point in bringing up the school-age disaster training that all Baby Boomers went through was that we did it, we weren’t terribly scarred by it, and looking back, we’re glad the authorities decided to take some measure of preparation, rather than decide it was better to just stand by and do nothing and hope for the best.
As the husband of a fourth-grade teacher who now has to drill her students regularly on invasion responses (and has seen the thinking about how to respond to those invasions change, from barricading to escaping), I commend Tracy—who as far as I, and he, know is the first to bring active-shooter and workplace-violence training into a club setting—for also deciding to take this issue beyond doing nothing and hoping.
Last December, a golf club across the street from the San Bernardino shootings became an emergency-response site. We all hope that’s as close as any industry property ever gets to an active-shooter situation. But we can’t stop at hope.
As Tracy was reminded as he began to consider bringing training for those situations into a club environment that’s intended to be a sanctuary from the unpleasant parts of life, it’s naive to think our properties are immune from workplace-violence incidents, whether they come from outside our walls or from within. And a case can certainly be made that country clubs may in fact rank very high on the list of potential targets in the minds of those who seek to make political statements or exact revenge for perceived wrongs in their own lives.
As we’ve also seen far too often and tragically, typical security measures are no match for those who are intent on bringing the most extreme forms of violence to bear. The best security, as Town & Country employees learned and agreed after attending their seminar, comes from learning to spot warning signs as much in advance as possible, and in being well-prepared to respond once they’re seen—or, short of that, as soon as an incident may begin to unfold.
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