Security advice for a mass shooting event

Being involved in a terrorist attack or incident involving a mass, or “active”, shooter can be a frightening prospect. On our hostile environment awareness training courses (HEAT) we teach people who may be working in locations where a mass shooting may occur how to respond. But, not everyone will take a HEAT e-learning, HEFAT, or SAFA course. So, what should you do to stay safe?

Here, Business Insider's Claudia Romeo talks to former Safer Edge Director Steve McCann about what he would do in a mass shooting. Click here to watch the video.

"The way I look at it is that I don't let security drive my life. I simply just make choices that mean I've got more control.

Depending on the nature of an attack. Of course if it's a bombing of some kind of, that would be simply a case of checking out my condition and seeing if I could help other people in the event. If it's something different like a complex attack shooting, for example, the Bataclan model in an enclosed space I would hope that I had planned to be in a place from which I could extricate myself, but that's just my normal practise. I just make it part of the way I live and work. I book a flight, I sit near the exit, I've never had to - I've never needed it but it's just, you might as well.

If you've got a choice with the current context, what we know is playing dead, although it may work, it may not. It is now less likely to work than was previously thought in different circumstances we know the individuals tend to go around, you know, shooting bodies. I would simply be looking to escape as fast as possible and put hard cover between me and those who are shooting them and our cover is thick, brick walls, not car doors,"