Great Britain has a new tool for combating the very real threat of terrorism—an app.
Called “CitizenAID,” the app delivers useful information about how to react if a terrorist strikes: Run, Hide, Tell, Treat.
Then again, watching the cheerfully dismal animation on the CitizenAID website, you might be forgiven for thinking that the first strategy—Run—is of limited utility: A small green figure flees past crumpled, bleeding, green figures, only to be shot in the back by a black figure wielding a pistol.
At that point the Hide and Tell (that is, call police) options would seem to be of even less utility. And so there’s advice on what to do next—triage. Learning techniques for treating the wounded is the goal here, as one might expect from an initiative affiliated with the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine.
But the nonconfrontational options that make up the rest of the app’s information are solidly in line with official British policy. “IN THE RARE EVENT OF a firearms or weapons attack,” advises the U.K.’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, “RUN HIDE TELL.” They explicitly recommend that “It’s better to hide than to confront.” CitizenAID’s helpful icon illustrating the HIDE option shows a person peeking around from behind a tree. (It should be pointed out that this is a lousy way of, as Monty Python put it, “not being seen.”) The quality of the hiding notwithstanding, it isn’t exactly Churchillian stuff.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has offered decidedly more pugilistic advice: “1. Run, 2. Hide, 3. Fight” are their, er, bullet points.
For those with the foresight to be armed, the advice might instead be “Run, Hide, Shoot Back,” but without the running and hiding part. But in general, one is assumed to be at a disadvantage while fighting, and so fighting is suggested only if you have no other choice. But if so, the U.S. advice is to go all in: “Attempt to incapacitate the shooter,” DHS suggests. “Act with physical aggression and throw items at the active shooter.”
It may hardly be the best strategy in every circumstance (throwing a desktop stapler at a man with an AK-47 may be the height of folly). But it has been proved—for example, by three resolute Americans on a train from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015—that resistance to terror, even by the unarmed, can have its role to play.
