This is a video of a bad guy who took some shots at police and then killed himself. I just want you to focus in his action at 1:44 where the video is cued.
One of the thing I have promoted for a long time is the fact that if you are trapped inside a location during an active shooter situation and your life is not immediately in danger, it is not a bad idea to use your gun to try to escape via a window or locked glass door. You may want to shoot at a downward angle and near the frame to minimize the possibility of an injured bystander, but don’t get too fancy if the shooting is incoming.
If you go somewhere and you do not come up with an escape plan the first minute you are there, you are taking unnecessary chances.
This.
Find the exits. The grocery store or gas station you visit every week? Drive behind it and see where the exit doors and loading docks are. Look for the fire exit signs inside. When at work, look around and find the exits off your floor, out of the parking area, out of the conference rooms.
When at home, walk into each room and ask, how else can I get out of here? If there is a fire in the hallway, a madman with a gun, a tree falls and crushes the hall way.
Talk this over with the spouse, ask them to think and prepare. When the kids are old enough, do the same.
Big healthy suggestion: Don’t consider the main entrance as your emergency exit. DO NOT.
Here, look at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire#/media/File:Stationvictims.png
This is a chart of the fire at The Station nightclub in 2003, otherwise known as the Great White fire. Areas where bodies were recovered are circled and noted with numbers recovered. Notice he area by the main doors? Right there, and in the area leading to the main doors, is where 51 of the 100 killed were found.
What happens is, there’s an emergency and people start trying to get out. Most of them head for the same entrance they came in by, because that’s human nature to go out the way you came in. Things go fine, until someone trips. Then someone else trips over them, and another, and another… and before you know it there’s a crushing mass of victims pushing against an immovable blockage of victims and the fire just keeps getting closer. If you’re not already out before the blockage forms you are never going to get out.
Find a different exit, even if it means throwing a chair through a window and jumping. Even better, plan ahead of time how you’re going to get out if all hell breaks loose. And if you see that someone has chained or otherwise secured an emergency exit door (see the Hamlet chicken processing plant fire just for one of many), just leave right then.