No one can stop a lone crazed gunman from entering a public place and massacring civilians (with the exception of Jack Bower from 24, of course). We can't lock down all of our public venues and body-search all who seek entry. It simply won't work. Even in tightly secure areas such as airports, this task is problematic. We read about their challenges and failures on a daily basis. If airports can't accomplish this mission with sufficient human resources, technologies, and structures, how can schools?

There are other places around the world that are able to secure public venues, almost as much as we are able to secure our U.S. airports. These countries must secure their public venues because incidents such as the incident we experienced recently in Virginia occur in those countries on a regular basis. America cannot achieve such readiness overnight; this would require a fundamental change in our structure.

What would it take to build a secure fence around every campus in the U.S.? In case someone with intentions of jumping the fence, would we have enough security personnel to safeguard those fences and keep all of our campuses safe? How about our shopping malls, parks, and other public venues? Are we to hope for the best as we wait patiently like sitting ducks (no pun intended) for the next attack?

There are various actions we can take as a result of this latest ‘wake-up call'. No need to focus on finding who to blame for the incident; the media has been doing an outstanding job covering this area. One action we should take is to analyze what made this event "the most horrific shooting in American history". During the Virginia tension, the gunman blocked the exits of the engineering department building by bolting the doors shut. The rest was simply up to the cruel proficiency of the gunman.

We should all understand that there are two main concepts that are vital to our public safety: emergency procedures and deterrence measures. The doctrine of emergency procedures is widely known, even though most don't really know what they should actually do during an emergency, but that's another story. The only emergency procedure training we received in school was during our fire drills. Thankfully, we haven't had any fire related fatalities in any of our schools in the past few decades. However, we are faced with other types of fatalities - school violence and shootings.

What is a teacher to do during a ‘lockdown' in a hostage situation? How will a teacher learn to think strategically about basic threat mitigation? What guidelines and tools are we giving our teachers to equip them to handle a situation where students are being threatened by a gunman? You'd be surprised to know that most teachers don't have any idea what to do and they might even risk the safety of hundreds of students to save one, without even knowing it.

How do we train our teachers and simultaneously deter bad guys? Target selection is deliberate, not random. The Art of Deterrence^TM is all about thinking differently, deterring aggressors, and shifting their target selection.