I've taught Active Shooter/Critical Incident stuff for a while now. Here's my impressions:
1. People are trained to be sheep for the most part. It's sad and frustrating. I work really hard to help individuals and organizations to overcome that. The biggest first step is to get people to understand that you can't stop everything, but you DO have options and decisions to make, even if you are caught with pants down.
2. We use a combination of experience with violence, experience with threat assessment, and experience with behavioral profiling. Then we combine that with ALICE, and some hands on exercises to help people take action. A lot of people in classes just want a mathematical formula to survive.... like if bad guy does X, they can do Y. That's not how life works. We use OODA loop as a framework for making decisions, and then Run/Hide/Fight as well as ALICE to break down the options they have within that framework. The challenge is that as an organization, you can't just put out a message telling people what to do, because YOU DON'T KNOW what they are seeing. So the answer is to upgrade their 'software'. Make decisions efficiently that force a bad actor to react to YOU.... not vice versa.
3. The biggest thing that helps people is showing them how to effectively barricade an area, position themselves tactically, and how to physically confront a shooter the instant they come into the space to they don't have time to collect data and select victims. It's empowering to adults, and we've had excellent feedback.
4. I am extremely pro-gun in my presentations, and point out the hypocrisy of Massachusetts laws as often as I can. I've never had any complaints
5. I don't shoot people with sim guns or airsoft guns. That just creates a feeling of powerlessness and training scars in my opinion. They already know they are behind the 8-ball, and it's pure ego when 'alpha males' run around shooting people to 'show them'.