Take another look at Tirecs list. The shooters are nut cases looking for death. They want to have an audience though, their 15 minutes of fame and most of them want to go down in a blaze of glory with all guns firing. Offering to engage in a shoot out with them is not a deterrent or a control.
However they are not really interested in being taken out in front of a locked door before they get to do any damage.
They are no different than suicide bombers.

Another sad point is that when you look at all these shooters in schools, churches and other public buildings most of them have already aroused suspicion in their communities because of their bizarre behaviour. Often they are shooting inside of their own churches and schools

Yes my philosophy of this is a bit different.
These people are obviously mental. They have a death wish and an imaginary score to settle.
I think just the fact they are not already in a padded cell is a security breach.

I do think of exclusion first. If I could I would not let them approach within range at all. If I could stop them at the parking lot I would. If the best I can do is the doors then so be it.
If they make it past the doors hopefully they made enough noise doing it that the people at the next point are warned.

If they have already been allowed into the crowd it is too late to prevent carnage. No matter how much of a quick-draw artist you are or how accurate you shoot they are going to get some shots off.

Benjammin caught the point about layers of security, and yes each layer has to be backed by another layer.
How many layers you get and how effective you will be at preventing incidents depends entirely on how much you are willing to pay for.
If all you are willing to pay for is volunteers in the congregation then all you are getting is the final layer of response.
Not only that, your final layer offers these nut cases exactly the response they desire. They want that big splashy exit. Remember when you look at Tirec's list what most of those people were after and how many of them suicided after they were stopped shooting.

As I said before, I have never been part of or responsible for a security team.
I have observed them and have done some of the set up for them though.
The most interesting security provisions I saw were for President Reagan's visit to Toronto in 1988. The most interesting part to me was the month of preparations along the Gardiner Expressway for his motorcade to pass.
Lots of layers there.
There have been a few times I wondered if Reagan was even in that motorcade at all, or if he was quietly brought in by a completely different route.

The visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Prince Edward to Victoria BC in 1994 was kind of interesting too.
It was a lot lower key, but every bit as intense.
The sweep of all underwater structures and hulls in the harbour was a surprise.
Both of these people are surrounded by bodies which are there to get in the way of a bullet or take down an attacker if they need to.
But the only way that should ever be needed is if all the layers before them have already failed.

This brings us full circle now on why our security group chose the option we did:

A. The administration was not willing to support the use of force to suppress an attack.

2. Active security measures were viewed as repulsive to the purposes of the call to worship. Cameras, signs, and detection equipment was actually considered an impediment to the extended invitation and was voted down.

d - A visible security force/team present during service was considered too distracting and intimidating for the general congregation.

Thus, we were left with really only one viable option for this limited situation, which seems as practical as will be allowed. Under different conditions and facilities, a more layered and proactive security plan would be much more feasible.

Pretty much yes, Ben.
You notice something like it with airline passengers too.
They want the planes and airports secured but they get real annoyed about the need to go through security checks or to have their luggages inspected. It was especially so when the security was dramatically increased and became much more visible after 911.

People get the security they are willing to pay for. It is not just the money cost either.
The cost includes inconvenience and the challenge to their world view as well.
Even a house alarm costs you some convenience because you have to make the effort to set and maintain it. The more elaborate the security measures are the more inconvenient they are.

The challenge to the world view is a bit more deep. It would seem seeing security in place should make people feel more relaxed, but a lot of people are just reminded that the world is not as secure as they would like and they find that disturbing.

There is one other problem with security on a church. The Church wants to project the image of welcoming all persons and the image of being a safe refuge from the world at the same time.
Security negates both of those conflicting messages.

If you need people with guns protecting it then it is not a safe place, it is a place under siege.
If security is screening people at the door then they are not openly welcoming because they are excluding some people who are regarded as unacceptable threats.

I won't even go near what security means in regards to the power of God to save people from evils.
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Anyway, at the end of it all I would still say the first thing is to get control of the doors. You can call your people ushers, you can call them greeters. You can call them whatever you like, and they can be as smiley as you want.
Just so long as they easily identifiable and are competent to secure the access points.
If they can screen for you, and if there is a problem create enough of a disturbance and delay for the next level of response to get there, they have done great.

Yes, and we do have ushers at the entrance of the sanctuary, though they are never armed and likely not at all prepared to deal with any threat situation, but they are at least a presence. If nothing else they give the latent security force the chance to respond.

After Iraq, most of the places I frequent here now I consider to be targets of opportunity for bad guys. Just a different mindset. When you see a whole city block set ablaze in less than 30 seconds and the houses full of bullet holes where the day before they were full of families, well, how do we in our present condition defend against something like that? The answer is for now at least, we don't. Odds are such an attack will never happen. But if it did, the devastation would be overwhelmingly thorough.

Well, I agree there is a point to that Ben.
We do have different views.

At least two sets of doors if possible. The Foyer first, then the Sanctuary doors.

The second comment is about profiling the threat.
One thing to consider is that most of these shooters are not organized very well. The best they are able to put together seems to be a suicide run with guns.
Because they are usually mentally unstable loners they are too socially disconnected to have a team or other support either.

I think that is why you see them doing the sniper and mall shooter OK corral type of plays in their little bids for attention.

I have one other thought to throw at you here.
If they had the knowledge, or organization behind them, to put together a Oklahoma City scene then having an armed congregation would not help much.
Either they would detonate in the middle of your crowd and be going to meet Jesus in the sky just like any other Jihaddi, or they would be expecting to stay secret and get away with it like Nichols and McVeigh.
(Of course Nichols and McVeigh are not in the profile of most of these Church shooters because it was a political action on their part and not for personal attention.)

The other shooters that appear are the estranged husbands and the boyfriends. There are always the people who are doing an shooting, knifing or beating out of purely personal motives.
Seldom are there attacks over business interests, but they do happen.
Either way whatever the reason these ones are just doing the murder in public is because it is where their intended victims are.
These ones are not usually after fame or "glory" but are after a specific target who just happens to be in your building.
They might be there to shoot the ex-wife or the mother in-law, they might be an upset wife there to kill her cheating hubby, or they might even be after an accountant who stole their life savings from them.

Now some questions for you.

If you were teaching your doormen what to watch for and alert you about, then what things would you put into the profile for people of interest?
Facial expression, body language, known personal conflicts, whether the person looks too disturbed or too calm, how much of a loner they are?
If you were alerted to somebody in the profile would you check them out, maybe refer them to counselling, or possibly even report them to official departments for suspicious behaviour?
Would you have somebody keeping an eye on them just in case they tried to do something?
In other words would you take a proactive or a reactive position?


I know profiles are never perfect and the intelligence about personal issues might not be available but those are things that should be worked on too.

If you know somebody in your congregation who suddenly starts acting "funny" then that should be a person of interest so far as security goes. You can consider the outreach or counselling people as a security resource in this case too.

Finally one odd observation and question. Very few Churches are ever robbed even though they have decent sized collections of cash during service.
So why aren't more Churches robbed?
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I just wanted to add one more thing Ben.
I mentioned earlier that security personnel get re-purposed to act as defacto first aid responders, ushers, parking attendants, cab hailers, tourist info, lost child locaters and everything else.
The flip side of that is all of the people doing those jobs can also be re-purposed to serve security functions, usually without them even being aware they are now part of a security system.

I think you had already picked the thought up, but I just wanted to make it explicit instead of implicit.

Wow, Scafool, how'd we make it on to the same page all of a sudden?

The threat will manifest itself differently and for different reasons based on the target audience. It would be difficult if not impossible to defend a church like ours from an organized politically or socially based attack, but fortunately our church is not a relevent enough target for such a thing at this point in time. Not enough return on investment for such an attacker to hit a church when there are schools, courthouses and the like that are much higher profile.

BTW, we too have two sets of doors, the threshold door at the foyer and the interior doors into the sanctuary, and both are manned by greeters/ushers. If I were to train them, it would be to get as intimate as possible with new faces; the idea being that those with alterior motives will tip their hands easier if confronted. In other words, getting up close and personal with someone who has an agenda for attack will most likely force them to give away a tell as to their intention. As you say, facial expressions, willful disengagement, nervousness, anxiety, all are reads that tell the observers there's something there that warrants due diligence. So I think our lines of thought now are congruous.

I also expect that Sunday morning collections might become a bigger prospect for the desperate. One thing that thwarts this notion is most folks nowadays are writing checks for collection than dropping cash. If someone were to case our church and notice that most of the paper in the trays is not legal tender, I expect they'd seek fortune elsewhere.

To some extent, we are making use of the inferential intel and opportunistic contact our greeter staff use to give our latent forces a bit of a heads up, and yes, it is inadvertant on the greeters' part. Good call.

If the bubble does ever go up, I expect Churches will be a rallying point for many. For this reason, we do keep a cache hidden at church that no one else knows about.

We still have some differences in our approach Ben, but we are at least in the same chapter of the book, even if it isn't exactly on the same page.
I still think the security should be visible and kept separate, and I do recognize the factors that interfere with that too.

We likely have some profound differences in how we would do the walk through too.

Oh I dunno. I bet we are closer on that than we'd believe now as well.

I'd be happy to do a walkthrough with you anytime. Always a chance for me to learn something more.