If you are caught in an active shooter situation, the Run, Hide, Fight response endorsed by federal agencies gives you three priorities in order: get out if you can, hide and barricade if you can’t, and fight only when the attacker is on you and there is no other option. Most incidents end within minutes, often before police arrive, so the people already in the building are the real first responders. The FBI counted 48 active shooter incidents in 2023 and 24 in 2024.1Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Releases 2024 Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Report What you do in the first thirty seconds matters more than anything else.
Run: Get Out if There Is Any Way Out
Evacuation is the first and best option whenever a path to an exit exists. Department of Homeland Security guidance is blunt: evacuate regardless of whether others agree to follow, and leave your belongings behind.2Department of Homeland Security. Active Shooter – How to Respond Your laptop bag and phone are not worth your life. Move away from the sound of gunfire using whatever route is available, even if it means going through a window, a kitchen, or a back corridor you have never used.
A few rules are non-negotiable while you move:
- Never use an elevator. It can trap you or open directly onto the threat.
- Keep your hands visible so responding officers can immediately see you are not armed.
- Do not stop at the parking lot once you are outside. Put real distance between yourself and the building.
- Warn and block others from walking back toward the danger.
- Call 911 only after you have reached safety. Dialing while you are still inside burns seconds you may not have.
If someone refuses to move, keep going. Stopping to argue or physically drag a person puts both of you at greater risk. Encourage them firmly, point toward the exit, and leave. DHS guidance specifically says not to attempt to move wounded people during evacuation.2Department of Homeland Security. Active Shooter – How to Respond That feels wrong in the moment, but the logic holds: getting out means one more survivor and one more person who can direct first responders to where they are needed.
Hide: Barricade, Silence, Stillness
When every exit is blocked or the shooter stands between you and the way out, your priority shifts to creating the most defensible position possible. Find a room with a door that locks. If the lock is weak or absent, barricade the door with the heaviest furniture in reach, pushed tight against it. Filing cabinets, heavy desks, and copy machines all work. The goal is to make entry slow and loud enough that a shooter moving fast decides to keep going.
Once you are barricaded, go dark and go silent. Turn the lights off. Silence your phone completely, not just the ringer but vibration too. A single buzz against a hard surface carries farther than you would expect in a quiet building. Stay low and away from any windows or glass panels that give a sightline into the room. If other people are with you, spread out rather than clustering together, because a single position makes everyone vulnerable to a single burst of fire.
If you can safely reach a phone, call 911 and give your location. If speaking would give away your position, dial anyway and leave the line open. Dispatchers are trained to gather intelligence from an open line, and the ambient audio helps tactical teams understand what they are walking into.2Department of Homeland Security. Active Shooter – How to Respond Many 911 centers now accept text messages, which is often the safer option when you are hiding.
Stay hidden until law enforcement comes to the door and identifies itself. Even then, verify before you break the barricade. Officers will not be offended by caution.
Fight: Full Commitment or Nothing
When the attacker is in your room, or about to breach it, and there is no way to run or hide, fighting is what’s left. CISA’s guidance frames this clearly: “commit to decisive and aggressive action” and “fight until the threat is neutralized.”3CISA. Active Shooter Preparedness Action Guide Half-measures here are more dangerous than not fighting at all. Full commitment and overwhelming aggression are what make this survivable.
Use anything within reach as a weapon: fire extinguishers, chairs, scissors, coffee mugs, laptop power bricks. Throw objects first to disrupt the attacker’s focus and aim, then close the distance. If several people are in the room, coordinate to approach from different angles at once. One person grabs the weapon while others tackle the shooter. Yelling has a tactical purpose too. It disorients the attacker and pumps adrenaline into the people fighting.
Once the threat is subdued, move any weapons far away from the attacker and prepare for police to arrive. Do not hold onto a firearm. Officers entering the room will not know who is who, and anyone standing with a gun becomes a potential target.
Self-Defense Law Covers This
Using force against an active shooter falls squarely within the legal framework of self-defense in every U.S. jurisdiction. The standard requires a reasonable belief in an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, and an active shooter scenario satisfies that threshold about as clearly as any situation can. A majority of states have eliminated the duty to retreat when you are somewhere you have a lawful right to be. Even in states that keep a general duty to retreat, it typically vanishes when retreat is impossible, which is precisely when fighting becomes the option.
If You Are Carrying a Concealed Firearm
Armed civilians face a serious danger of their own during an active shooter event: being mistaken for the attacker by responding police. Officers arriving at the scene are trained to treat anyone holding a weapon as a potential threat. DHS guidance instructs everyone to “put down any items in your hands” and “keep hands visible at all times” when law enforcement arrives.2Department of Homeland Security. Active Shooter – How to Respond If you have drawn a firearm, holster it or set it down before officers reach you. No identification sash or verbal explanation reliably prevents a misidentification in a chaotic, high-adrenaline scene. Compliance and visibly empty hands are what work.
What to Tell 911
When you reach a dispatcher, four pieces of information matter most:
- Your location, including street address, floor number, room name or number, and which wing or section of the building.
- The shooter: how many, appearance, clothing, and direction of movement.
- The weapons you observed, whether a handgun, a rifle, or something else.
- A rough count of injured people and where they are, so medical resources can be staged.
Stay on the line after you deliver this information. Even if you can no longer talk, an open line feeds real-time audio to the tactical teams assembling outside. Dispatchers can relay gunfire, movement, or silence to officers, which helps them decide where to enter and how to approach. If you can only whisper or text, do that.
What to Expect When Police Arrive
The first officers through the door have one job: stop the killing. They will move directly toward the sound of gunfire in small teams. They will not stop to help the wounded, answer questions, or assist with evacuation. That feels cold when you are terrified and injured, but every second spent on anything other than neutralizing the shooter costs lives.2Department of Homeland Security. Active Shooter – How to Respond Medical teams stage outside and enter only after officers declare the area secure.
When you encounter responding officers, keep your hands up with your fingers spread. Do not grab an officer, do not point at things, do not make sudden movements. Follow every verbal command immediately, even if it feels aggressive or unreasonable. You may be ordered to the ground, searched, or briefly restrained. Officers cannot tell survivors from threats in the first minutes, and their default is to treat everyone as a potential risk until confirmed otherwise. Expect firm treatment. Comply without hesitation.
Once the scene is secured, you will likely be directed to a staging area where investigators want your account of what happened. You are not obligated to give a detailed statement on the spot. High-stress events produce unreliable memories, and the Fifth Amendment protects you from compelled self-incrimination.4Legal Information Institute. Fifth Amendment Basic identifying information and a general description of what you saw is reasonable. For anything more detailed, asking to speak with an attorney first is your right, and exercising it is not suspicious.
After the Shooting: Stop the Bleed
Once the threat is neutralized or you are in a secure location with an injured person, uncontrolled bleeding becomes the most urgent problem. The Hartford Consensus, developed after Sandy Hook, established the principle that “no one should die from uncontrolled bleeding” and empowered bystanders to provide emergency hemorrhage control before paramedics arrive.5Stop the Bleed. The Hartford Consensus Compendium The sequence is simple: make sure you are safe first, find the source of bleeding, apply pressure.
Direct Pressure and Wound Packing
For wounds on the torso, neck, or groin where a tourniquet won’t work, direct pressure is your primary tool. Use your hands, a shirt, a towel, or any clean fabric and press it into the wound. This is not gentle first aid. You need sustained, firm pressure held for at least three minutes without releasing to check. If blood soaks through the first layer, pack more material on top without removing what is already there. The goal is to fill the wound cavity with enough material to create internal pressure against the damaged vessel.
Tourniquet Application
For severe bleeding from an arm or leg, a tourniquet is the fastest and most effective intervention. Place it two to three inches above the wound, between the wound and the heart. Never apply a tourniquet over a joint like an elbow, knee, or ankle, because joints protect the blood vessels underneath and prevent the compression needed to stop arterial bleeding.6Department of Homeland Security. Stop the Bleed – Applying a Tourniquet Tighten it until the bleeding stops. With a commercial tourniquet, twist the windlass rod until flow ceases, then secure it. A properly applied tourniquet hurts. If the person is not complaining about pain, it probably is not tight enough.
If no commercial tourniquet is available, improvise one from a belt, a strip of fabric, or a necktie, combined with a rigid object like a pen or a stick as a windlass. Improvised tourniquets are less reliable than purpose-built ones, so treat them as a last resort and check that they are achieving real compression. Note the time of application if you can. Medical teams need to know how long blood flow has been restricted.
The American College of Surgeons runs free Stop the Bleed courses nationwide, in person and online. Over five million people have completed the training.7Stop the Bleed. Get Trained A few hours transforms these techniques from abstract knowledge into muscle memory, which matters when your hands are shaking and someone is bleeding out in front of you.
Before Anything Happens: Small Habits That Buy Seconds
The most useful thing you can do in advance is build a mental map every time you walk into a building. Note where the exits are, not just the main entrance but fire exits, loading docks, stairwells, and ground-floor windows. This takes about ten seconds and costs nothing, but it collapses your decision time from minutes to moments if something goes wrong. CISA’s active shooter preparedness guidance specifically recommends having “an escape route and plan in mind” before any threat materializes.3CISA. Active Shooter Preparedness Action Guide
Scan for two other things: rooms you could lock or barricade, and heavy objects that could serve as barriers or improvised weapons. A solid-core door with an interior lock is worth more than a hundred feet of hallway. Fire extinguishers do double duty as barriers and defensive tools.
Learn to tell gunfire from other loud noises. Gunshots produce a sharp, cracking report that echoes differently than a slamming door or fireworks. Fireworks tend to follow a rhythm and come from a predictable direction. Gunfire is erratic and often paired with screaming or breaking glass. If you hear something that might be gunshots and you are not sure, act as though it is. Hesitation while you figure it out is the most dangerous response of all.
Emergency Alerts on Your Phone
Wireless Emergency Alerts push active shooter notifications directly to your phone without any app or subscription. They are broadcast from local cell towers to every capable device in the targeted area, using a distinctive tone and vibration pattern that repeats twice.8FEMA.gov. Wireless Emergency Alerts Active shooter warnings fall under the Imminent Threat category. You can opt out of some WEA categories like AMBER alerts, but not Presidential alerts.9Federal Communications Commission. Wireless Emergency Alerts and Accessibility Check that your phone’s alert settings are enabled for imminent threats. Some people disable them to avoid weather alerts and unknowingly shut off warnings that could save their life.
If you have a mobility impairment or another disability that would affect your ability to evacuate quickly, plan ahead. Identify the nearest accessible exit and a lockable room close to where you spend time in the building. Talk with coworkers, classmates, or building staff about your plan so they can help if needed. Stairwells are a common bottleneck for wheelchair users during emergencies, so find out whether your building has evacuation chairs or refuge areas on upper floors. A plan that only works for able-bodied adults is not a plan.