How to Conduct an Active Shooter Tabletop Exercise

Active shooter incidents remain a persistent threat to businesses across the United States, underscoring the critical need for preparedness and proactive response strategies. According to an FBI report, there were 48 active shooter incidents in 2023, resulting in 244 casualties, including 105 fatalities. Although these numbers represent a slight decrease from 2022, the broader trend reveals a concerning rise over the past five years—a staggering 89% increase in incidents since 2019.

Notably, 29% of these incidents occurred in commercial settings, including offices, retail spaces, and business parks, where employees are especially vulnerable. Such incidents not only result in devastating loss of life but can also have long-term impacts on employee mental health, operational continuity, and company reputation.

Given this environment, businesses need to commit to robust active shooter preparedness through exercises like tabletop drills, which help organizations test their response capabilities in a controlled setting. Investing in this preparation could make the difference between a swift, effective response and catastrophic consequences. Active shooter tabletop exercises can be an economical, low-stress way to give your employees instruction and confidence if they ever find themselves in an active shooter emergency.

What Is an Active Shooter Tabletop Exercise?

An active shooter tabletop exercise is a discussion-based emergency management technique to increase preparedness in a safe environment. Participants are guided by a “facilitator” to talk about a hypothetical active shooter event. Stakeholders verbally walk through such an attack and imagine what they would do to respond. Then, the facilitator introduces complicating variables, inviting the group to think critically about their plans and become more comfortable with on-the-fly thinking.

The advantage of using a tabletop exercise for active shooter training is that it allows for discussion and examination of a topic that many find highly distressing—but that is necessary to be ready for in case the unimaginable does occur. These interactive exercises typically take only an hour or two, and they take place in a safe and familiar environment, such as around a meeting-room table.

Conduct a Tabletop Exercise for an Active Shooter Scenario

You can implement an effective tabletop exercise in a single afternoon with the right preparation. However, developing a training exercise in the first place depends on broader active shooter planning. Building your training exercises and an emergency response plan can go hand in hand. AlertMedia’s step-by-step Tabletop Exercise Guide helps you clarify critical objectives for the most effective preparedness training.

Before you begin

Determine who will participate in the exercise. You need to fill the following roles:

• The facilitator is the moderator of the exercise. They know how the exercise is supposed to flow, and they step in with guiding questions if the conversation stalls.
• Gather your participants who will imagine an active shooter attack at work. Groups should be as large as your facilitator can comfortably manage.
• Finally, identify two evaluators. Their job is to observe the exercise without participating and take notes so that they can contribute to an after-action report following the training exercise.
• Consider including local EMS or local law enforcement to offer their insight.

Everyone can and should benefit from these training opportunities, but if your organization’s size necessitates multiple runs, train those who work in concentrated, accessible locations first. Offer follow-up tabletop sessions to extend the training opportunity to the rest of your employees in time.

Once you’ve identified the stakeholders for the group, define your goals. What are you hoping to learn from these exercises? Are you trying to create an active shooter plan or update an existing one? Or maybe you’re focused on familiarizing employees with the plan?

Once you have finalized all of this information, you need to document it. Our Tabletop Exercise Guide has a handy exercise overview template to complete and share with everyone involved.

Run the exercise

Once you’ve prepared for a tabletop exercise, gather your facilitator, evaluator, and participants in one room or, if required, a call bridge or video conference. The facilitator will introduce the exercise goals and describe the active shooter situation. They will set the scene by describing a normal day at work, then the beginning of the attack.

Participants then take over and discuss what they would do in this scenario. Employees will be asked to consider their likely locations in the event of extreme workplace violence and how they would respond.

Run through the hypothetical situation until first responders arrive and secure the scene. Then, start again at the top, but this time introduce a new variable to get people thinking about alternate solutions and prepare them for quick decision-making. These unexpected variables might include:

• Restricted exit routes
• Disabled communication methods and notifications
• People out sick who would typically perform essential response functions

After each run-through, allow time for discussion. The facilitator and participants should discuss what went well, what they think could be improved, and their general feelings about the exercise. The evaluator should take meticulous notes during this part.

Reflect and review

Once the group completes the exercise, the evaluators’ job begins. They work with the facilitator to create an after-action report (AAR), which is easier with our After-Action Report template. Using the notes they took during the tabletop exercise, they sum up their observations of the proceedings.

The contents of the after-action report should include:

• A summary of exercise objectives
• A recap of the meeting and its proceedings
• Things that went well and should be repeated in the future.
• Things that were missing or incomplete
• Areas of improvement

Teams should develop an after-action report as a standard part of the tabletop exercise process. The after-action review—or hot wash—can help improve the active shooter response plan.

Other Methods of Training for Active Shooter Emergencies

Tabletop exercises are just one method of active shooter incident training. Other methods include the Run, Hide, Fight strategy, where instructors teach participants that the best way to respond to a shooter is to try to run away from the scene. If that’s not possible, they should hide somewhere and barricade their position (shelter-in-place). Finally, if confronted with the shooter and no way to run or hide, as an absolute last resort, they teach how to work as a group and fight back with improvised weapons.

Finally, another popular technique is employing active shooter drills. These are simulated events where a fake gunman enters the location and acts as an attacker would—without a real gun. They’ll make noise, try to enter rooms, and physically test the defenses of a facility.

These drills are controversial as some claim that they serve only to stress out employees with artificial violence—without doing enough to prepare people for an actual shooter. The takeaway is that every organization needs to decide for itself what kind of emergency preparedness program is needed.

Preview of the Tabletop Exercise Template

Threats Beyond Active Shooters

Modern businesses face a wide variety of threats that vary depending on their business type, location, size, and many other factors. An employer’s duty of care is to assess their situation and prepare for threats both likely and unlikely, internal and external.

Tabletop exercises are a great way to gauge your preparedness and confidence for any hazard, and our guide makes designing them easy. For more ways to prepare for workplace dangers, check out our resource library for guides, templates, and more.