Suffolk Theater to host active shooter response training seminar on Tuesday

The Suffolk Theater is hosting a free active shooter response training seminar on Tuesday at 7 p.m..

Donald Longo, a private investigator and former Suffolk County Police sergeant, will speak on  how to identify the threat of an active shooter, cover the “run, hide, fight” response tactics used by the FBI, and how to identify and prevent a potential incident from occurring.

“Preparation is absolutely key,” Longo said in a phone interview today. “Most of the people who are involved in an active shooter incident, they all say the same thing: I never thought it would happen here. I never thought it could happen to me. I never thought I would be involved in something like this. That contributes to people being wounded or killed, because they have never considered it.”

Responding to an incident is “more complicated than you might think,” Longo said. “One of the problems is people don’t recognize what’s going on. So they don’t respond to it quickly — and time is your enemy when you’re involved in an active shooter incident.”

“They [the shooter] move very quickly and you have to respond immediately. So part of it is teaching people how to recognize the threat, recognize what’s going on,” he said. “Because most people will automatically explain it away, that it’s firecrackers [or] a car backfiring [or] it’s a number of things.”

Longo will discuss “run, hide, fight” tactics, which are used by the FBI and endorsed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to respond to active shooter incidents.

“What that means is, if you can escape the kill zone, you get out. If you can safely get out, you should leave the area. It makes no sense to stay there and provide the shooter with just sitting duck targets,” he said. 

“If you can’t, then you have to hide but you have to know how to hide and you have to choose the correct places to hide that are going to provide you not only concealment, but cover,” he said.

As an “absolute last resort” during an incident, you may have to fight the shooter, Longo said. 

“The only thing that you can do to try to save yourself is to try to engage the shooter and to grab control of that weapon., or if you’re trying to get out of the building and suddenly you turn the corner and he’s in front of you,” Longo said. “And unfortunately, we know that 80% of the people, when they’re faced with that type of situation, they freeze. They’re like deer in the headlights.” 

Our brains naturally freeze up in these situations due to shock, Longo said. One of the things he will teach is to visualize a shooting incident, in order to train your brain to be able to respond to the incident in a high pressure situation. 

It’s a “matter of being prepared, not paranoid,” he said.

The seminar will also cover how to prevent active shooter incidents by recognizing a potential shooter. “We know that about 70% of the active shooter incidents could have been prevented — not mitigated, but prevented — if people knew what signs to look for, because these people give off what we call leakage,” he said.

“It teaches people how to recognize those signs, and then do something about it,” Longo said. “That’s one of the failures, that people, when they do see the signs, they don’t do anything about it.”

Longo said his seminar will cover how to respond to active shooter incidents anywhere, including schools, workplaces, and public and private spaces. He said people within schools are often ill prepared for an active shooter, since they rely on lockdown and lockout procedures — which are ineffective if a shooter is already in the building — and often don’t use the “run, hide, fight” tactics. 

More details about the free seminar can be found on the Suffolk Theater’s website.

There were 61 active shooter incidents, and 103 killed and 140 wounded from those incidents, in 2021, according to the most recent report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation released in May 2022. The 61 incidents was the most ever recorded by the agency in any one year. Active shooter incidents are defined by the FBI as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area” with a firearm, according to the report. 

The FBI’s definition does not encompass all gun-related shootings, including incidents of self-defense, acts of gang and drug violence, contained residential or domestic disputes, or shootings due to another criminal act. Those incidents are sometimes included in counts of “mass shootings” recorded by other organizations, including the independent nonprofit research group Gun Violence Archive, which estimates 168 shootings have occurred so far this year.

Shootings have become a staple of life in the United States. Most schools in the U.S. conduct drills to respond to active shooters. The most recent fatal school shooting occurred in a Nashville, Tennessee elementary school on March 27, where the shooter ended up killing six people — three adults and three children.

Threats of violence to schools are also common. Two separate school shooting threats last year led to the arrests of Riverhead High School students. 

A Riverhead High School student was also recently arrested after he brought more than a dozen bullets, but no firearm to the school on March 31.