On Monday, Sept. 19, a Civilian Response Course was hosted by the Peachtree City Police at McIntosh High School for any students or community members who wanted to attend. The course was held in the Media Center from 6 to 8 pm., and presented by Sergeant Kevin Brown. Session information was presented on what to do in high-stress situations and how to react if there was an active shooter in civilian areas.

However, despite the training session being open to all members of the Peachtree City and McIntosh community, only ten people attended.

“Civilian response. What should we do? We don’t deny. We hear gunshots, we go straight to deliberation. We hear it [go] boom, we move. I can be wrong and outside, who cares? Or I can ignore it, be wrong, and get hurt,” said Sergeant Brown, speaking about civilian response to an active shooter.

Sergeant Brown also brought up videos and recordings of other mass shootings, such as the first 911 call of the Columbine School shooting, and videos of Highland Park shooting, as well as a video of a speech from a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting, Christina Anderson.

“One of the things that we talked about this is like, I’m not trying to be hard on Christina and don’t look at it like this, but we do this as a learning experience. Right? She was never taught right, so she didn’t know what to do. She did the best she could in that situation she was in. But what we can do is learn from her and go ‘what did she do?’” Brown said.

Sergeant Brown also spoke about the Deny, Deliberate, and Decide instinct, which was the main point of the presentation, and other ways to defend yourself against active shooters.

“So we take these types of actions behind a barricade, you deny them entry and then in addition to that, we start finding things that we can fight with,” Sergeant Brown said.

A member of the community who attended but chose not to give his name, commented on the course.

“You want to have this situation where you hope people don’t die, but it’s just not something they’ve been exposed to. They don’t think that this is going to happen, that it’s going to happen somewhere else. This is not the place where this happens,” he said.