Violence Resembling Terrorism—From the First Responder Viewpoint

Abstract

Terrorist attacks, school shootings, and other man-made incidents are demanding situations for first responders and society as a whole. Currently used concepts, like “active shooter” and “mass killing,” are typically created from the point of view of the perpetrator(s) or based on the incident site or the number of victims. In this paper, six police pretrial investigation records and four reports by the Investigation Commission are analyzed using inductive content analysis. The aim of the research is to determine attributes of violence resembling terrorism by approaching the subject from the position of first responders. Based on these attributes, the concept of violence resembling terrorism (VRT) is then created. VRT as a research unit produces essentially more empirical data, which is an advantage for research both on the academic level and in the more practical branches of security education.

Keywords:

• Active shooter
• mass shooting
• first responders
• terrorism